


Famous Last Words

by jendavis



Category: The Losers, The Losers (Comic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death Fix, Drama, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-07
Updated: 2011-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:04:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 40,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jendavis/pseuds/jendavis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cougar was bleeding all over the bomb in his lap, the last time Jensen saw him. But that was then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you're interested, I made a fanmix/ soundtrack thing. More info over [here](http://jendavis.livejournal.com/80360.html)!

Realization comes slowly, over the course of minutes, maybe years. He doesn't know how long he's been here. Or where _here_ actually is. It doesn't even feel like a place. There's no up, no down, no boundaries. No ground beneath his feet, either, but to be honest, he's not sure he _has_ feet, anymore.

He's insubstantial, weightless. It feels like he's nothing more than a trick of the light, but there's no light, here, to confirm. But he's aware, so apparently he actually _exists_. And really? _that_ is what's sending him reeling.

Because for all he knows, it's all in his mind. He can't feel his body. Has the sense of _hands_ and face and _chest_ , but they're just notions, now. Not solid, not real. He has to concentrate to feel anything at all, and when he does, there's no promise that it's unimagined contact.

It's no more convincing that the suspicion that he's recently blown himself away into nothing, that at one point, there'd _been_ enough of him to die, but he can't remember, not for sure. There was pain and blinding light and darkness and nothing at all.

His other memories are likewise hazy, incomplete, but he has the suspicion that at some point, back when it had mattered, he'd learned to admit when he'd lost a fight. It's that knowledge that rings most true, here.

Movement, not entirely his own, carries him on currents that he can't predict. Sometimes he can feel the current washing straight through him. He's dimly aware that it's cold, up here, he knows it without feeling it, somehow, just like he's dimly aware that there's not any air.

Doesn't matter, though, not really. He already knows this is death, and breathing, it turns out, is only as habitual as _not_ breathing, and he can't focus his thoughts enough to panic.

There's no telling which way is up, or down, but the currents push him onward, and flying feels almost like swimming. He drifts along for a while, familiarizing himself with the sensations of his existence.

There's no way to tell how long he's been here, and he still hasn't convinced himself that time has any sway here. Eternity's stretching out around him, and there's nothing at all in it, not even himself, not really.

But he'd thought hell would've hurt more.

\---

Another minute goes by, and another thousand years.

He thinks he's imagining the wavering light up ahead, but as it grows stronger it begins to sort itself into something resembling a sunrise, wide and wavering, and maybe- he can't be certain, but maybe there's an answer for him there.

The currents, though, they're shifting again, away from the light, and he's moving with them.

Irritation, it seems, is a sensation he's still able to experience. I

He tries to remember how this goes, what it feels like to exert some form of will, like it's something he's forgotten, something he has to think about now. He concentrates, though, for a while, but if the vestigial remains of his limbs begin to move with him, it's just another memory, another habitual impulse that doesn't mean anything any more.

Or maybe not.

 _There_. A movement of the legs, and finally there's more current washing against him than _through_ him. He's found friction, now. That? He can use.

He swings his arms, carefully, pushing the nothing back as he moves. It almost feels like walking against a strong wind, only no wind has ever cut through him so literally, or slowed him down so little.

He casts his attention out ahead, and loses the rhythm he'd very nearly managed when he sees the light grow brighter. He has to redouble his efforts. And again, and again.

Irritation finally gives way to frustration, to anger, and that's what finally pushes him through the forever, fighting every step and then he's there, he can see now, it's closer. A horizon, an edge, a bright shining surface, and warmth beyond it?

A few more swimming steps, and he's through, and he's not ready for the shock of it.

\---

The ice only cuts through him for a moment, but it's the choking that he realizes first, that sends him scattering into nothing all over again, and there's too much that he knows now. He needs a moment to take it all in.

First, he hasn't breached the surface, not completely. He's still swaying on the horizon, now, letting the waves on the surface push him where they will. And the waves? They're familiar.

He's in the water. Ocean. He almost tasted it, for a moment there, felt the sting in eyes he hadn't been sure were real, before the shock ghosted him back into nothing. There'd been pain, and cold, and half of a gasp for air pulled into screaming lungs.

He can't feel any of it any more, not in his present state. But he knows, now, that he _can_ , if he tries, if he gathers his molecules in. He could very nearly have a body.

He tries for what feels like hours, though, with no real success. It takes too much concentration to pull himself together, and the moment he gets close, he once again has to start breathing, start holding his weight above the water. And when he manages even that much, the cold air cuts against his face sharply enough to shock him back into pieces. His body, when it exists, feels weaker with every attempt, and it feels safer to stay like this, dispersed and vague. Easier to think, to take it all in. To admit that in all likelihood, he's a ghost.

The realization is unsettling, even more than the knowledge that he was dead. He's pretty sure he's never believed in ghosts, for all the nights spent haunted by dreams that were close enough.

He doesn't know _how_ he knows they were dreams, not with the jumble of memories that are tumbling out so messily now that he's trying to remember, and he doesn't know why the dreams occur to him first, even before his own name. But that comes easily enough, now, anyhow.

His name is Carlos Alvarez, or maybe it's Cougar. And if he has a name, it's because there'd been someone, somewhere, who'd needed something to call him. And even if he isn't actually, technically,  _alive_ any more, he _exists_.

And maybe, just maybe, he's not the only one.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

"Heard Antigua's nice for anniversaries," Pooch grimaced, pulling up to Jensen's at the harbor, hand hesitating over the stick, but not shifting into park. Soon, he'd be heading for the airport, trying his luck with the identity Jensen had cobbled together for him with shoelaces and chewing gum.

Every ally they had was dead, now, and there was no guarantee that their enemies would be satisfied with their attempts to likewise disappear. Going by the odds, Jensen would never see him again.

"I hate Antigua, man," Jensen groaned as they shook hands, but he meant, _yeah, if I make it, I'll buy the first round_.

\---

The first month, everything was too fucked to even _think_ about going on a bender. It was just survival, then. Laying the groundwork to bury himself, then covering his tracks as he skates through seven countries in as many days.

The second month, though? The third? Jensen hadn't honestly believed he had it in him.

\---

After the drunken binge of the third month, the fourth and fifth were-

No. Shit. They were more of the same. A thousand back-room bars, lonely bottles in lonelier hotel rooms. Occasional stumblings towards sobriety that only lasted long enough to procure what was needed. Money for the hotel. Food. More alcohol, to black himself out too deeply to dream.

The _sixth_ , though, was the morning after that stretched on forever, and it was anticlimactic when it arrived.

Somehow Jensen had woken up without a hangover. That was all it took, really, but it allowed him the first three minutes of uninterrupted thought he'd had for months.

First, he took a minute to look around. Had to check the hotel's phone book to be sure he was still in Sydney, and realized that he wasn't even sure when he'd arrived, if he'd been there for a week or a month.

It was time to bail. On all of this. There were three bottles on the bedside table, and they all went down the drain.

\---

Jensen headed off for Istanbul without leaving a note, because it would've just listed off all the things he'd suddenly realized he hated about himself, anyway.

Like the fact that he couldn't even pretend, really, that he was actually paying attention any more. At first, he'd genuinely forgotten that wasn't anybody there to watch his back. Afterwards, when he'd remembered? It was _because_ of it.

Or the awareness that he'd lucked out so far, if you could call it that, but he wasn't probably slated to live much longer. He'd never told his sister he was still breathing, not after the last time, and it wasn't like there was any reason to, now, but. Shit, nobody in the world knew him, any more.

He turned on the television, flipped it over to the news, just to hear another human freakin' voice while he packed.

"… massive tidal waves that rocked the shores of Qatar , killing nearly four hundred people, and displacing thousands more, six months ago," the newscaster was saying, looking into the camera intently as he spoke. "And even now, experts say, the full extent of the damage caused by the nuclear accident that created the tsunami has yet to be seen."

The shot changed, then, nothing but sky and choppy water, and then down, lower. A school of fish, a brush of kelp straining towards the surface. "It seems, however, that though the ecology of the Persian Gulf may never recover, the fears of a dead zone being created in the Arabian Sea may have been unfounded. As you can see on this footage, taken a few miles off the coast of Oman, new marine life is once again finding its way into these waters…"

By the time Jensen knew what had happened, he was on the bed, screaming into the pillows. It wasn't until the innkeeper burst into his room, drawn by the sounds of his moment of clarity, that he realized he'd already ripped a chunk out of the flimsy headboard with his bare freakin' hands.

The innkeeper clicked her tongue over the damage, the bed and the lamp Jensen had apparently managed to knock over, and rolled her eyes at the bloody state of Jensen's hands. After disappearing for a moment, she returned with a stack of clean washcloths and a bucket of ice.

Jensen tried to calm down, promised to pay for everything, and decided that he'd chosen a shitty day to sober up.

And _fuck_ his fucking hands, anyway.

\--

See, it was stupid.

Pooch, when he'd flown from out of freakin' _nowhere_ with the chopper to rescue everyone and found only Jensen, he'd been prepared. He'd picked him up, and after they'd made it several miles inland, and they'd blown the helicopter to smithereens-

 _and fuck, it was just a goddamned helicopter, but it had been one fucking explosion too many. It sounded like that other one that they'd heard, miles behind them, lonely in the ocean, and Jensen didn't stop shaking for three days, afterwards_ -

-they'd made it to the truck Pooch had stashed, and hadn't stopped driving until they'd crossed into Jordan. It hadn't been until they'd reached the hotel that Jensen realized that Pooch had managed to find everyone's gear, that he'd had it all in the truck the entire time.

Pooch's planning had looked like pathetic optimism, in retrospect. They'd brought it all inside, anyway.

Clay's bag hadn't had much. Enough cash to float on, for a while. Three burner phones and the medals he'd gotten back in Kuwait. Two changes of clothes.

There'd been three in Aisha's bag, and enough bandages to start a hospital. It had been unsettling as hell, seeing evidence that she'd known she was human, that she knew she could bleed. Stuffed down in the bottom had been three photographs, worn nearly to scrap. Jensen hadn't recognized any of the faces. One of them might've been hers.

He'd taken the bandages and set them on the bed, next to the phones and the cash.

Cougar's bag had only had one change of clothes, a gun cleaning kit, four empty boxes of ammo, and nothing else.

Pooch had found a knife in Aisha's jeans, and another one, ceramic, in Clay's jacket sleeve, once he'd started going through their clothes. There'd been nothing useful in Cougar's clothes, but in pocket of his shirt was a book of matches, from that crappy bar in Abilene where they'd all had their last good night. Before this had all started.

Charlotte's phone number was still written on the inside. She'd been funny, with awesome legs that were just _this_ side of skinny and the wickedest laugh Jensen had ever heard. And of course Cougar had cock-blocked the hell out of him- it was the way of things, after all- and Jensen had been forced to move on to calmer waters. No harm, no foul, and she'd been pretty enough, but Jensen didn't have a matchbook to remind him of Calmer Water's name, though.

It wasn't like Charlotte needed to be notified, but the matchbook had made its way into Jensen's pocket, regardless, because there was nothing else in the bag worth taking.

\---

And _Fuck_ Jensen's hands, anyway, the way they'd go to his pocket, draw the matchbook out and fidget with it whenever he wasn't looking. The way they always put the damned thing back, afterwards, so damned carefully, always in the left hand pocket.

The matchbook was worn, now, soft and white around the edges, and he hadn't tried opening the flap in weeks, because he was pretty sure it would all fall apart, then, and he didn't honestly know what he'd do when that happened. He doubted that it would be cathartic, hat he'd actually stop thinking about it, because-

 _Fuck. Cougar._

Cougar hadn't wanted to go on that last run. Jensen hadn't, either, but. Aisha and Clay, they'd been balls to the walls for it, and even going in, they'd been down Roque and Pooch.

Not only would Clay and Aisha have died, they _never_ would've been able to finish the mission before it happened.

But- and here was the thing. At that point, Jensen hadn't honestly given a rat's ass about the first half of that equation- about Aisha, or Clay, and he'd known, even then, that he probably should have. And maybe that had been why there'd been _just_ enough guilt left to get him on board. Just enough to turn the away party into a ruling majority, and _he'd_ been the one to ask Cougs-

Cougar hadn't wanted to go. He'd said it was his final gig, swore that he'd be done, afterwards, but Cougar had agreed. Jensen had done to Cougar what Clay and Aisha had done to him.

\---

So no, it wasn't like Jensen's hands were entirely clean. At least this time, sitting here in the hotel room with an increasingly annoyed innkeeper shooting him wary looks, the blood was there where he could see it, where he could feel it under his nails.

\---

Spain was a mistake. Slight differences, yeah, dialect and all that, but. Hearing people talking in the street, the couple who ran the hotel asking if his room was okay, the cabbies, the news.

Men were worse. Sometimes, they even sounded familiar, and it was impossible to fucking think, to plan, to move the hell on, when every time he left his tiny box of a room, his eardrums were assaulted with it.

Jensen lasted a week and then he fucked off to Ireland.

\---

The weather suited him, here, dreary and gray. Without the heat frying into his brain, he could actually _think_ , and once _that_ started, the rest kind of followed.

He'd been sloppy for months, now. He'd taken cares, yeah, to take himself off the grid. No phones, no computers, no anything at all.

He'd cut himself off to lick his wounds, but really? It had been seven months, the world had been lurching steadily onwards, and so far, nobody had kicked his door down. If he'd been in anyone's sights, the trigger hadn't been pulled.

Jensen wasn't deluded enough to think that the world was a safe place, now, but it was still out there, and he was starting to miss it.

Next week was his niece's birthday, and Jensen found his eyes lingering, more often, on the duffel bag where Clay's burner phones were packed. They'd been paid for in cash, and were totally untraceable. But the phone at his sister's place wasn't. And her cell could be tapped from a computer in _India_ , without her ever knowing.

So a computer it was, then. A cheap one, but he didn't need it for much, yet, though Jensen wasn't sure if the _yet_ was just a habit of thought, or if somewhere, in his brain, plans were actually being made.

The netbook cost less than a week's lodging, a couple hundred euros, the café down on Dawson street had unsecured wifi, and he was good to go.

\---

Fucking hell, his sister was on _Facebook_ , of all bloody things. His niece, too.

His sister's posts were sweet, random. Funny videos her coworkers had forwarded her, and endless bragging about her daughter. She'd missed him on his birthday, and that had been, fuck, that was the second blind-drunk month, he hadn't even noticed, he'd been so far gone.

Attached to the post was a picture of the three of them, taken back before he shipped out the second time.

It was careless, he knew it was, but he downloaded the image and set it up as his desktop's wallpaper. Stared at it for a little while, just because he could. It was a better picture than the one in his wallet, the one in front of the house, when Jensen'd been helping her move in. His niece looked like a kid, now, not some amorphous blob in a blanket.

His niece's posts made no sense at all, cartoon images, cute boys, pictures of her soccer team and iokes with her friends. Pizza and ice cream and puppies, more cute boys, and she was still too fucking young for any of that, but. _Shit. Thirteen, now, and-_.

-None of this was telling him anything. At all. Just making him sad and miserable. He should've known better.

He was seven months out of practice, but it only took half an hour to write the code, and the program wouldn't harm much of anything. He copied some text from one of the more obviously dubious Viagra suppliers, and borrowed her friend Katie's email address to send it.

His sister would open it, mark it as spam, and probably call Katie up to make fun of her for having her email account hacked, and they'd laugh about it as Jensen gained access to everything on his sister's computer.

It occurred to him, as he was waiting for the files to download, that though hacking his sister's email account had been the most reasonable thing he'd been able to come up with under the circumstances, it was still probably kind of shitty.

On the other hand, as luck would have it, his sister checked her email ten minutes later, and her files were already beginning to transfer to his computer.

It would take a while, upwards of an hour on the café's shitty wifi, but Jensen hadn't been online in months. He had to catch up. Wars, cease-fires that wouldn't hold much longer, scams, taxes, unemployment. Returned soldiers complaining about their tours. Every lack of solution that every politician could possibly present. A new crop of pop stars he'd never heard of, and movies he hadn't seen. Hollywood cults and, hopefully unrelated, eight missing children. There were UFOs over Dallas, apparently, and a painkiller recall after ghosts had been seen running around on a Navy cruiser. There were too many breakthroughs in genetics research to count, and even more panicking about privacy rights. Some teenager had accidentally stolen his dad's computer when he'd taken his girlfriend out to the prom. The general had been pretty red in the face, by all accounts, but the footage of the soldiers storming the dance was kind of hilarious. And it was just as well that he'd missed the games leading up to the Super Bowl. He would've had cash down on the Vikings.

Eventually, he had everything he needed copied to his hard drive, and too many things he _didn't_ need filling his head, so he shut it all down. After stopping off for takeout on the way back to the hotel, he sat himself down at the desk and began to read.

It took less than a minute to know that he wasn't the only one who'd pulled this stunt on his sister. She didn't have an account, anywhere, that hadn't been under surveillance, but from the looks of it, it was all old activity.

About five months ago, all the eyes had wandered elsewhere. It made sense. Jensen probably wasn't the only dead asshole the US thought to keep an eye out for. Eventually, they would've had to move on. It was flattering, almost, to think that they'd looked for him as long as they did.

He stared at the wall for a while, the screen's light a distraction in the corner of his eye.

Apparently, he'd won.

\---

Still, though, it took another month for Jensen to find the balls to go home, and another to figure out _how_.

It took two days for his sister to believe he was real, and another three to consider forgiving him. and if it hadn't been for his niece, or the fact that it was Christmas, and his sister was feeling like she ought to be charitable, it might not have happened at all.

It was all a little anticlimactic.

Friday night, late, after his niece was asleep upstairs, he finally got to sit at the kitchen table and explain himself to his sister, the photo he'd sent her years ago sitting out between them. He kept it down to two beers, because yeah, he'd made it this far, he was back in the states and back in her house, but he couldn't afford to tell her too much.

Still, though, it was more than he'd ever told anyone, and it was more than he'd actually _said_ in months.

Mostly, he talked about Clay, who'd driven everything, and Pooch, the one stand-up guy out of all of them, the only other one to survive it all. It was harder to talk about how Roque had screwed them after years and years, or how Aisha, who his sister had never met or even heard of, had taken months to do the same.

Even so, it was a hell of a lot easier than talking about Cougar, how he'd gone down fighting and not fighting all at once. How he'd vaporized himself to save Jensen and the others, to get some rest. How Jensen had known, for years, how badly he'd needed it.

There hadn't even been a funeral.

"There wasn't one here, either," his sister pointed out, frowning to herself as she went to the fridge for another couple of beers. "Just. Some guy came by, offering condolences on behalf of the free world on a Tuesday night, and a memorial down at Aunt Bea's church that weekend, you know? Crap, that was," she squinted, apparently having to give it some thought. "That was _ages_ ago."

She'd hit the nail on the head, only it wasn't the one she'd been aiming for. She'd thought him dead for a while now. And she'd moved on with her life. And maybe Jensen could- _should_ do the same.

He could give it some thought, anyway.

Things were a little better after that, for a few days. But eventually, his sister had to go back to work, his niece to school, and there just wasn't room in their lives for him being so close, any more. It was time to move on, or at least move onwards.

And maybe _that_ was why he saw it, when he was down in the guest room, packing up his things. Random, fleeting, and barely there, just a hint of something out of the corner of his eye, a sharp turn of a shoulder that felt familiar, and it was gone.

He didn't know why he'd decided so certainly it had been Cougar. It was a little ridiculous.

\---

The second time he thought he saw Cougar, another month had gone by, and he was standing on a beach in Mazatlan feeling the sand grinding between his toes. There and gone before he'd known it.

There were kids playing in the wet sand a few yards away, and they had no freakin' idea, at all, what exactly was running through Jensen's brain, what he'd thought he'd seen, and it was just as well. Wouldn’t have taken a shrink to explain it, and he wouldn’t have wanted the opinion of a strange nine year old weighing in, anyway.

Because yeah, he was s thinking about Cougar a lot, these days, 'cause even though Mazatlan hadn't been his home- Jensen had never really known _where_ Cougar's home had actually been- this was as close as anyone was ever likely to get.

This was where Cougar had gone on leave, every single time. He'd liked it here, he'd even told Jensen about this blonde surfer girl he'd hung out with, once, when he'd been trying to keep him distracted as he stitched up the gash in his leg. Cougar had talked about the bonfire, college kids and blaring stereos, pot and beer and none of them caring about anything at all. He'd talked about not leaving the beach for two days, and sleeping out on the sand.

Standing here now, watching the waves, Jensen could see why Cougar had liked it. He was starting to like it, too. And maybe that was the fucking problem.

Because it was insane enough that he'd come here on a carefully considered whim, that his plan-to lay this fucking ghost to _rest_ , already- wasn't working as much as he'd hoped, and now, maybe, it was time to start worrying again.

If he could convince himself that Cougar was actually haunting this beach, then he could probably talk himself into anything, and his willingness to go off the deep end really only went so fucking far.

It was a little troubling, but he'd come this far already. The only thing left was to throw the matches into the water and go to the hotel.

\---

The sheets were cool beneath him. Cool Hand Luke was playing on the laptop by his feet, but he'd stopped watching a while ago. Mostly, he was staring out at the sky through the open window, and making deals with himself in his head.

Tonight was his last night in Mazatlan.  He was in the world's most comfortable bed. And yeah, no, he didn't feel like sharing it tonight, but. Fuck it, trying to force it out of his head hadn't worked. Maybe just this once, he could have what he wanted. He could let himself, and tomorrow, he'd figure out how the hell to move on.

He stroked slowly, at first. It felt a little bit like the first time, all over again. Like he had to work up the nerve. Allow himself to not staplegun images of Angelina Jolie over what his brain had taken to thinking about, lately. Allow himself to not feel guilty.

Fuck it, for all he knew, jerking off in a hotel bedroom, thinking about your dead best friend was all just part of the healing process.

Outside the half-opened window, the stars were coming out, fighting their way past the smog.  
He could see his unbent leg reflected in the glass, and the swirling print of the blanket painted blue by the laptop's light.

If he listened carefully, he could just make out the sounds of water hitting the beach, but maybe he was imagining it. Somewhere, down on the street, a couple was arguing. The Spanish didn't hurt the way it used to. He strained his ears, tried to make the tones into something else. Something lower, quieter. Familiar.

Something that matched the face he'd almost seen earlier, at the beach, with that same pull at the corner of the mouth.

His spine curled into it even as he began to forget, again. The fantasy was hard to maintain, it was muzzy, far away, distracted and vague, but suddenly, plain as day, he managed it, almost without trying.

Cougar was standing there, naked, at the foot of his bed.

Jensen's eyes slammed shut as he came, hard, all over his fingers, and they didn't open when he heard the computer crashing to the floor. They didn't open when his heart felt like it was going to explode in his chest, or when the aftershocks hit his spine like lightening.

 _Damn. Just. Damn._

He coughed, once, grinning, and opened his eyes, but he hadn't thought he'd be surprised to find himself alone. Hadn't been ready for it to rip through him so fucking badly, but there wasn't even the hint of a shadow, of a movement of air. There was nothing there to convince him that Cougar had been real. Of course not.

 _Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence._

There wasn't anything to _disprove_ it, either.

Jensen was losing his fucking mind.

By the time he got his breathing back under control, he'd pulled on his boxers and recovered his thankfully unbroken laptop, and was hacking his way onto yet another flight.

He had to get the hell out of here. Right freakin' _now_.

\---

He arrived in Antigua almost a full month early, his eyes never straying far from the calendar. It was going on one year, now, and in a few weeks, maybe, if he was lucky, Pooch would show. In the meantime, he kept himself busy, moving.

It didn't hurt that Carnival was happening, right in the middle of it. He spent ten days straight, just wandering through the crowds. Took some photos with a cheap camera he'd bought, even mailed his sister a postcard that he signed _George_ , out of habit, more than anything else.

It was easy to stay distracted. Impossible, actually, to concentrate with the calypso music blaring off of every corner. He was pretty sure the steel drums would be ringing in his hear for at least another month, maybe two, if they didn't make him deaf first.

The cricket games were calm, by comparison, if only just barely, but after catching several matches over the course of a few days, he was no closer to understanding the rules of the game than he'd been at the outset. He was going to point it out to Cougs-

-but Cougar wasn't there. He still forgot about that, sometimes.

He missed most of the game, after that. Just went back to the hotel bar, where he met this girl, Bethany, with red hair and freckles. They hit it off for a while, right up until she scrunched her nose, laughing, to ask, "So let me get this straight. You've been here for two weeks and you haven't even gone out on the water. Not even a _boat_ ride?"

And it wasn't like he could explain it to her without explaining _everything_ to her, and really? She didn't have the freakin' clearance.

He went back to his room alone and crossed another day off the calendar.

\---

Jensen hadn't honestly imagined that they'd both make it, but he'd been keeping an eye on the Observer and, almost a year to the day, there it was. Some guy selling a Jen387Sen computer for cheap. Ports new, monitor not included. Inquiries to be made at the Hotel Hawksbill, up in Five Islands.

Pooch was out on the patio, a beer already in his hand, shouting his name. His _real_ name, which would've been unthinkable a year ago. It was kind of awesome.

"Thought I said I'd catch the first round," he said, by way of greeting, grabbing Pooch in a quick hug.

"You should've gotten here earlier, man" Pooch said, waving him into a seat with one hand and looking around for a server. Attention drawn, he turned back to him. "Please tell me this isn't actually the first daylight you've seen all year. You look like shit."

"Thanks," Jensen grinned, rolling his eyes, because this? This was familiar, and he was totally down for riding that for a while, but halfway through the second beer, midway through Pooch's description of the horrible orange Jolene had insisted on painting the kitchen, he got thrown the fuck off.

The others should've freakin' _been_ there.

There'd never been time for a funeral, let alone a memorial. Not even a wake, unless you wanted to count Jensen's season long bender, but this was as close as they were likely to get.

So they toasted Cougar, Clay, even _Aisha's_ scary ass with sweating beer bottles and for a minute, there, it had felt like he was finally doing something right.

And then Stegler fucking found them. Crept up out of the woodwork towing the company line, even offered them their jobs back. Security. Backup. A lot of promises that Jensen wished he could believe in.

It wasn't too hard to tell him to fuck off.

\---

Down on the beach, because Pooch hadn't been here long enough to get tired of it, they thought it through. Stegler'd always had their backs, when he could. He was a standup guy. And fuck, Jensen could see Pooch's point. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to knew where he stood.

"That's just dreamin', man," he had to say, though, and it wasn't just habit, but. "I mean. How'd he know we were here? He says nobody else knows, but how do we know he wasn't followed?"

Pooch didn’t have an answer for that. Truth was, the world wasn't as big as it used to be, and Stegler's promises hadn't changed anything.

Both of them had fallen quiet, thinking it over. Pooch had to be at the dock in just under an hour anyway, and there really wasn't much else to say, or at least Jensen thought. Heading back in the direction of the hotel, though, Pooch cleared his throat.

"You ever see him?" Pooch asked, not looking at him as he spoke.

"Huh?"

"Cougar."

Jensen sighed, dimly aware that he'd _known_ , the moment Pooch had opened his mouth. He shrugged, not wanting to commit. "Yeah. Maybe. You?"

Pooch, for his part, didn't seem to want to talk about it any more than Jensen did. "A few times. More, lately. It's weird."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean, I know it's just dreams, or whatever, but. Well. About a week ago, he showed up again. Actually spoke. Asked me where you were, can you believe that? I wound up waking up Jolene when I told him I didn't know." Pooch smirked, shaking his head. "It's weird, right?"

"Yeah." Jensen rolled his ankle, trying to dislodge some of the sand from his shoe. "You ever see Clay?" he asked, because he didn't want to ask the thousand questions he had running through his head. _Did he say anything else? Does he seem okay, or is he miserable? Was he dressed when you saw him? Why didn't he ever talk to me?_

"Nah, man. Not once."

Jensen nodded, swallowed some guilt. This was Clay they were supposed to be talking about, anyway. "Me neither."

\---

One hour later, Pooch was gone again.

Three hours after that, Cougar arrived.

\---


	3. Chapter 3

"No. No fucking way."

One minute there was nothing in the bathroom but Jensen and the fixtures, which, now that he thought of it, sounded like a great band name, but that wasn't the point.

Because the next moment, just five steps later, Cougar was standing in the middle of Jensen's room. Hat and all, he was looking at him with a smirk that didn't quite reach his eyes, they were a little too wild.

And _that_ was what sold him. Jensen didn't make a practice of imagining him hesitant, not at all.

"Cougar?"

"Sí, Jensen," a grimace, then, a raise of his eyebrow, and that was about all Jensen could take.

He stepped forward, reaching out. He'd barely registered the fact that his hand connected with Cougar's arm, before lurching into him, grabbing him fast, before he slipped away again, before Jensen's brain could catch up to the actual _depth_ of his hallucination.

A second later, though, Cougar's hair was still caught in his stubble, and the hat was still lying on the floor where it had fallen.

Cougar was _there_ , solid, taking a breath in to speak, and-

-and then he was fucking _gone_.

\---

The hat was still there though. Lying on the floor no matter how many times Jensen blinked his eyes or tried to look away.

It took a good three minutes for the shaking to set in.

There wasn't any more getting around it. Jensen had lost his mind.

\---

He still wasn't breathing right when he heard the knock at the door, the sound nearly setting him to panic, again.

It was cool. He could play it off. No reason for anyone to know how freakin' _loonball_ he was. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and opened the door.

Cougar was standing on the other side, with no hat to hide the outright _worry_ on his face.

"Lo siento," he said, waving his hand because apparently, even now, Jensen couldn't hallucinate him being verbose. Cougar nodded at the white-knuckled grip that held the door open. "Didn't want to surprise you."

Jensen shook his head and stepped back, at first to avoid his own insanity, and then, functionally, to let Cougar inside. The brush of air as he passed felt too fucking _real_.

"Ship's sailed on that one," he said, closing the door with a last glance at the hallway, scanning for an audience that thankfully wasn't there. Cougar reached down and picked up his hat, but it wasn't until he'd put it back on that Jensen tried again. Screw his failing mind, anyway. Jensen could roll with it. "So, ah. I'm insane now."

"No," Cougar said, his tone sympathetic. "Usted no está"

Cougar's hand on Jensen's arm was real. It _felt_ real.

 _Roll with it_.

"Then you'd better fucking explain."

\---

Cougar had been rehearsing it for months, in his head, but now? It was too insane. He couldn't wrap his head around it. And there it was again, the sensation that he was about to fade out, again. It took him a moment to gather his thoughts, gather himself in.

He leaned against the dresser as Jensen sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at him with this expression that was just too burning to look at.

Cougar hadn't realized he'd be responsible for Jensen's sanity. It just made things worse.

"So." Jensen said, after a minute had gone by. "You were going to tell me-"

Cougar shrugged, shook his head. "Sí, pero. I don't know where to start."

"Okay," Jensen nodded, scowling and determined. "Start small, or. Well. Not. Whatever. So. Are you dead?"

"I have a pulse," Cougar shrugged, "when I actually have a body." Jensen's scowl deepened, but he didn't reply. "Sometimes I don't. Have a body."

"How's _that_ work. I mean. You shouldn't, anyway, because last I saw, you were Mexican Swiss cheese, man, and that was _before_ the nuke. Which brings me around to _why_ aren't you dead?"

"No sé. I remember being in this dark place, not feeling anything. It went on forever. Thought I was dead, a ghost in limbo."

"Jury's still out on that one," Jensen muttered. "Though for the record, complete hallucination's the current leading theory."

Cougar shrugged. "Turns out I was in the ocean, but if I thought about it, I could reach the surface, so I did."

"You _did_.' Jensen was incredulous. Annoyed, too. "Okay. _How_?"

"It's hard to explain," Cougar said, but that wasn't entirely true. It wasn't hard, it was _impossible_ , trying to find the words to describe what it felt like, having no body, not feeling anything at all, of being able to see all directions at once, or the heavy weight when he regained his shape. "I figured out that I could make myself solid, if I concentrated enough. I couldn't keep it up for long, though." He looked over at the middle of the room, where he'd disappeared, earlier. "It's still hard."

"You're still here," Jensen pointed out.

"Sí." _Only because I'm trying._ "I've been practicing," he offered, because he couldn't say more, not yet. Couldn't explain that how some sensations scattered him back into nothingness. That it was a reflex, like squeezing the trigger once he made his target, like backstepping away from a rattlesnake.

Because then he'd have to admit that he'd come in hopes that it would ground him, keep him in the world. Because he'd thought that wanting to _be_ in a place was enough to _hold_ him there.

And then he'd have to explain why, exactly, he'd chosen to come _here_ , and have to think about why he'd scattered when Jensen's arms wrapped around his back.

\---

Cougar finally shut the hell up- not that he'd said much of anything, really, but this, Jensen figured, was more a matter of content than word count- and gave Jensen a minute to take it all in.

One. Cougar was alive.

 _Hard crash. Reboot_

Okay, so he was _here_ , and may or may not have been a figment of Jensen's slowly shattering brain.

Jensen knew he was staring, saw Cougar staring right back at him.

Cougar may have disappeared, then, for just a second, but Jensen wasn't sure. And anyway, he never stopped staring back, his eyes were back on Jensen's a fraction of a second later.

Then again, Jensen probably wasn't the scariest thing Cougar'd ever stared down.

Fuck, he'd stared down a bomb.

"Hey, ah, Cougs?

"Yeah?"

"You hungry? Hang on. Do you _eat_?"

It was literally the stupidest question on the list, no doubt, he knew as much even as he was saying it, but he hadn't figured out how to even go about _phrasing_ the important ones.

Plus? Liquid lunch. Fuck, that was probably what this was. Had to be, because Cougar? He fucking _laughed_ , face splitting into a grin, the corner of his eyes crinkling, the whole nine yards.

He couldn't even remember if it sounded right. It hadn't just been a year, it had been _years_ , ever since the Khyber Pass. Jensen kind of wanted to point it out. He didn't really know why he didn't.

It was a relief when Cougar handed him the room service menu, and said, "You're buying."

\---

The menu had been a risk, because Jensen looked like he was about to jump out of his skin, or at least the window. Maybe getting out of the room, going out somewhere, would've been better. Given them both something else to look at. But it might've meant disappearing out in the middle of a crowded restaurant, so it wasn't really an option.

Jensen was studying the menu carefully, as if become some sort of aficionado over the course of the past year, and hell, maybe he had. Cougar had no way of knowing.

When Jensen eventually passed it back, Cougar gave it no more than a cursory glance before almost habitually choosing the fish. Barely noted what kind it was, to be honest, as long as it was cooked.

After the ocean, he was never eating sushi again.

He took up the menu again as Jensen dialed room service. Chose the pasta, instead.

\---

Dinner was less of a meal, and more of a delay tactic, and it was likely that Cougar knew it too, but was playing along. Jensen, for his part, was barely aware that he was eating. He glanced down at his plate more than once to remind himself what he'd ordered.

He thought about turning the television on, just to have something to fill the room, but it felt a little transparent, and besides. He wasn't planning on tearing his eyes off Cougar for even the shortest moment any time in the near future.

"So." Cougar had already finished, and was opening two fresh beers, passing one to Jensen. "What've you been doing all this time?"

 _What do you think? Being a depressed, psychotic, paranoid asshole_ , was probably admitting too much, but he turned it around easily. "Oh no," Jensen shook his head, talking around the food in his mouth. "You're not done explaining. Not by _half_ , man."

Cougar looked reluctant, so Jensen prodded him. "Just. I don't know. Start from the beginning. Or. You know. The end."

So Cougar did. Grimaced, sat back in his chair, and began, again, to speak.

\---

For the most part, Cougar kept himself spread out over the waves, just waited forever. Once in a while, just to make sure he hadn't been imagining it, he pulled his body together, but it took effort and only resulted in having to fight to stay above the waves. He never lasted long, like that, and every attempt grew harder.

On the third day, he saw a shark. On the fifth, he saw eight of them, and they never had any idea he was there.

On the seventeenth, maybe it was the eighteenth, he saw a ship, coming up from the east and heading his way from the edge of the horizon, but by the time he'd managed to drift into it's path, he'd realized the size of it.

Too big to be there for a rescue mission. But also too big to be there to finish the job.

He waited, shifting carefully on the waves to put himself in its path, knowing how suicidal it was. If he timed it wrong, he'd be dragged under, or dashed against the side of the hull. Maybe it would cut right through him with less effort than it did the water.

And still, it was coming closer, _fast_ , and the waters were rough enough even without it's wake that he was probably going to miss.

This was probably going to kill him.

The shadow from the bow had fallen over him, now, and the upswell of the water being sluiced to the side was wreaking havoc with the currents, shaking him from his place.

He had to draw himself in against the force of it all, just to hold himself together. He had to wait to hit the ship and-

-the merest brush of impact, and the near slicing of metal, and he was through, heavy in the air, and sinking, already, through what was the floor.

He forced himself back together, thought himself solid. Made it so, just to stay afloat.

It was easier than he expected, this time, without the water trying to wash him apart. But it had a downside, too.

He was hungry. _Starving_. Cold, too. He had to glance down at himself to see, but he was naked. To be honest, it didn't really register until he heard the startled shout, the voices coming from behind him, and by that point, he was again without a body.

"What is it, Graydon?"

"Ah. Nothing, man. Thought I saw something, is all."

"What did you see?"

"Ah, seriously? Some naked guy. Freakin' weird."

"You _do_ realize that it's _mermaids_ you're supposed to be seeing when you're out at sea this long, right? Or is there something that I'm not asking about?"

"Fuck off, Aiken. What're we supposed to be grabbing?" The lights turned on, and Cougar realized that he was in a cargo hold. He watched the two men perusing the stores.

"Flour, salt and oil," Aiken said, and the two men began perusing the crates, scanning the shelves, loading up the cart they'd brought with them.

A few minutes later, they were gone, and, more importantly, Cougar knew where the food was.

It was mostly rations, the usual slop, and he had no way to put it together, but just through another wall was another room, stocked with MREs.

He _feasted_.

Afterwards, it was easier to stay solid, keep his form, and even though it was fucking _freezing_ down there, and he hadn't quite re-mastered the art of walking for any length of time, but it was worth it.

\---

"So how long were you on the ship?" Jensen asked, mostly to give Cougar a chance to drink some more beer because it sounded like his voice needed it.

"Three days." Cougar smirked, shook his head. "I didn't notice the cameras on the ship. I didn't know they were coming. They opened the door and shot at me, and then I was in the ocean again. Fell right through the hull. By the time I'd put myself back together, the ship was already a mile away."

"No shit?"

"True story. It was really irritating."

"I bet." Jensen nodded and tried to think of what a normal, sane person would ask next, but he came up blank.

\---

Cougar was getting tired of talking, but Jensen was still watching him. So he continued.

"After the ship, I didn't know where I was, or where I was going, so I just rode the currents. Swam, sometimes." Smirking, because he knew it would freak Jensen out, he added, "I learned how to catch fish and eat them without drowning."

As expected, Jensen's face was frozen in horror, but Cougar moved on before he'd have to explain the entrails it all had entailed.

"Eventually, I started seeing more boats, the water became warmer, shallower. Another day and I could see the shore, so I swam in. Landed in Madagascar. You ever been there?"

Jensen shook his head.

"It was a strange place. _Much_ of the time, I stayed, ah. Invisible," he said, because maybe sometime, he'd get around to explaining the chaos he'd caused being caught out by an elderly woman, the shouts of _angtara_ that had rung out all over the street, how it had taken hours to figure out that they'd known he was a ghost, or that then, he'd believed them.

Instead, he stared out the window, watching the waves washing up over the beach, and tried to explain what was relevant. "While I was there, I learned how to keep my molecules together enough so that friction could work, and I could walk without being seen."

Jensen nodded, still gamely playing along. "A halfway sort of thing."

Cougar nodded. "Sí. It's harder than being, ah. Bodiless, but less tiring than being solid." Sipping his beer, he finally identified the rest of the path through this entire conversation. "I did not like Madagascar. As soon as I figured out how to move, I did. It was easy to get on a plane."

"Yeah?" Jensen gave it some thought, and his tone sounded just the slightest bit jealous. "I suppose so, being _invisible_."

"I went through security scanners just to see what would happen. Nothing did. Stayed bodiless on the flight," Cougar said, not mentioning the slight bit that he gathered his molecules in, just to feel the redheaded stewardess pass through him, "and eventually made it to America."

Cougar sighed. He was done talking, for now, but thankfully Jensen didn't press. The color had returned to his face, but he still looked a little stunned. And the next part of the story? Would only make it worse.

"You mind if we take this up later?" Jensen said, apologetically, as if he'd interrupted. "It's just. I'm tired, and I need to think, you know?"

"Sure," Cougar said, standing, and Jensen followed suit, startled and quick.

"Where you going?"

"The ocean," Cougar said, unthinkingly. He hadn't noticed himself making the decision, but it was easier to exist out there, sometimes, and he was tired, not so much from keeping his body together, but from talking all night. It was draining,

"Oh," Jensen said, a little sadly, and Cougar grabbed his shoulder, squeezed as he stepped past.

"I'll be back tomorrow morning. Promise."

\---

Jensen eventually gave up on sleep sometime around dawn, ordered up some coffee, and turned the television on.

It was a little startling to find that the world looked pretty much the same way it'd looked yesterday. Kind of surreal, to be watching the newscasters talking about the same shit they'd been talking about yesterday, and they day before that, when reality had fucking _changed_.

There was a knock on the door, and the guy delivering room service had probably seen worse than Jensen's boxers, but there was no reason for the glare as they traded coffee for last night's dirty dishes.

It was really amusing when the story about the mining accident switched to a new one, about a massive funding increase for science education in the universities. Geneticists, gravitational physicists, computer scientists and molecular chemists were already squabbling over what to do with the money. Cue the academic public face, talking about how this country needed to again take an interest in looking at the world, blah blah, discovering new frontiers, blah, evidence of life, blah blah, understanding the universe, blah.

Jensen giggled. He already had proof of life after death, he'd let it congeal into a solid mass on the table overnight, and now it was being sent down to the dishwashers.

Whistling to himself, he grabbed a quick shower and wondered how long he'd have to wait for Cougar. Had his fifty-seventh freakout as he was washing his hair, but by the time he was reaching for the towel, he'd talked himself out of it. _He'll come back_.

He wasn't wrong.

Cougar was, again, standing in the middle of his room when he returned, staring at the television, and Jensen was about to fill him in on the line of self-help seminars he wanted to start- _you, too, can raise the dead with the power of positive thinking_ -when a hand shot up, silencing him.

"Mira."

" _…essentially discovering a radiation signature, which identified the bomb as being created by Goliath Technologies, and the UN had reported the six megaton device as missing a year and a half ago from a known stockpile, but many questions remain. No comment, yet, from Goliath officials, but questions on this will be fielded at Goliath's press conference later this afternoon_."

"Covering their asses once again, no doubt," Jensen muttered to himself as the news cut for commercials, rummaging through his bag for some clean clothes. Heading back into the bathroom, he shouted through the door. "So what, you want to watch it?"

"No," Cougar said, when Jensen came out, but his eyes strayed back to the television again.

Fuck it, Jensen could leave it on. If they caught it, they caught it. "There's coffee, if you want. You hungry, or did you catch something on the way in? That was an attempt at a fishing joke, by the way. In case you missed it."

"Uh-huh." Cougar shrugged. "I could eat."

Jensen dove over the bed to rummage underneath, coming up with one shoe and one sandal. After a moment's consideration, he went down to search some more, talking over his shoulder. "There's a good place at the other end of the block. Their waffles make the blind see, the old, young, the hungry, full. But their coffee might kill you, so just stick to juice. We'll feed up, come back here, or whatever, and catch up on the wackiness that is your existence, because, man. I still don't believe any of it."

Tying his shoes, he stood up. "Which reminds me. Just so we're clear, you're not a cyborg that was created by an enemy government, possibly our own, programmed to break my brain, are you? Because if you are, I'll have you know, you're not doing a very thorough job. I mean, it's pretty good, I didn't sleep all that much last night, but I haven't quite been reduced to gibbering in a corner while rolling in my own filth just yet."

Cougar quirked a brow. _You sure about that_?

"Shut up. Let's go."

\---

When they reached the diner, as they were waiting to be seated, Cougar felt Jensen's eyes burning into his back. He shifted, kept his profile low, just enough to catch their reflections in the glass behind the counter, and watched.

He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but thought he might've had it when a waitress appeared and confirmed that they wanted a table for two.

Jensen's shoulders lost a little bit of their tension, then, or maybe it was just the motion of walking that was loosening them. By the time they made it to the table, Jensen's grin was back, wide and easy, carefully covering the relief he didn't think Cougar could see there.

 _Sí, Jensen. She saw me, too. I'm not imaginary. You're not crazy._

He would've said it out loud, but it wouldn't have helped anything. Besides. It had probably taken Cougar six months to believe that he wasn't actually a ghost. Jensen had known for less than a day.

The food was good, and Jensen's narrations were carefully unremarkable. Sightseeing he'd done. Carnival. Running into Pooch, and Stegler, too. Every once in a while, he'd pause, look over his mouthful of food, and it was clear that there was something he wasn't saying, wasn't asking, but he wasn't an idiot, and this diner was small.

\---

It was a relief, mostly, to get back to the hotel.

"So how'd you find me?" Jensen asked, once the room had been checked for bugs. Some habits died harder than others, especially the ones that often kept them from, well, _dying_.

"I followed Pooch," Cougar said. It was mostly the truth, and it meant he could avoid mentioning the fact that he'd haunted Jensen's sister's house for over a month, hoping that Jensen would visit, write, even call. That when Jensen _had_ shown up, a few days before Christmas, he'd watched them through the holidays, wanting to make contact and realizing exactly why he shouldn't.

Jensen's niece was never more than a few feet away, the entire time he was there.

And even at night, when Jensen retired to the basement guest room, he was a mess. He'd make a scene, and they wouldn't be alone for long. His sister would come, and things between her and Jensen were screwed up enough as it was.

He hadn't felt like an intruder, there, really, until Jensen had arrived. And he hadn't stopped caring about that until Jensen had been packing his bags, getting ready to leave.

He'd tried to make himself appear. Then Jensen had looked at him, and he hadn't been ready for it.

By the time Cougar had pulled himself together enough to do anything about it, the cab had been pulling away from the curb.

He'd tried catching up with him at the airport, but never found him.

\---

"It was easy to find Pooch's family," Cougar said. "Jolene's sister still lives in Ohio, so I tracked Pooch from there."

"Did you- did you talk to him?"

"Tried to, once, after I saw him booking his flight here. Scared the hell out of him."

"Thought so. He told me about it. You know, for a sniper, your timing sucks. Did you really wake up Jolene?"

Cougar nodded, shrugging it off. "I thought it would be better if he thought he was dreaming. I didn't realize he'd woken up. Went to Mexico after that."

Juarez, first, it had been. But he found that his grandmother's heart was dangerously dodgy, and she'd always been superstitious by nature. Hector had become a father only days before, they'd named the baby after his dead uncle Cougar. The household had been tired enough with one Carlos making himself known in the middle of the night.

"I have a _sobrino_ , now" Cougar said. "A nephew."

Jensen grinned, wide. "Your brother, right? Coolest thing in the world, ain't it?"

Cougar thought about it. Found that maybe, he agreed. Once this was all figured out, when he knew what was going on, he'd go back and introduce himself.

"So where'd you go then?"

"Ah." _Y aquí se trata de. And here it is._ Cougar found himself unable to meet Jensen's eyes. "Mazatlan." The entire year had been nothing but one big question after another, and he'd needed to think.

Jensen was nodding before recognition stole over his face. "Oh…the beach?" he asked, hopefully, but the blush was already coming up over his ears.

Cougar nodded, no use in denying that he knew why. He'd been in the ocean, drifting near the shore, when he'd thought he'd seen him, when he'd fought against his better instincts and tried to appear. When he'd failed, again, and had to search through every hotel and dive in the city for another glimpse of him.

He'd run as fast as his half-disembodied feet would carry him, and he'd found him, too. Stripped down, boxers draped around one of his ankles, getting himself off.

Feeling the urge to become a ghost once again, Cougar remembered the panic, when he'd realized he'd materialized without trying, when he'd _known_ he'd been seen. When he'd felt the air of the room around him when he shouldn't have..

That time, when Jensen bolted, Cougar'd let him.

Now, though, Cougar smirked. "Forgot that I left my clothes on the beach before going swimming. Lo siento."

"From what I remember, I'm probably supposed to be apologizing, too, but I was having too much fun at the time," Jensen laughed. "But, I gotta ask. The clothes thing. Like. Showing up dressed. How's that work?"

"If I reach out as I'm fading, and wrap myself around something, surround it completely, I can bring it with me. It's tiring, so I don't do it all the time." Jensen wasn't looking at him, though. For all his bravado, he was still probably fairly mortified.

"After that, I figured you'd be here when Pooch arrived. I followed him from his house and made sure he wasn't being followed by anything other than me. The rest, you know."

\---

Jensen didn't know what to say to that, because really? He was pretty sure that he didn't know jack over shit. But he was happy enough to play along.

"Were you there when Stegler showed up?"

"Yes. I followed him, once I knew where you were staying. He's gone, already. Flew to DC, traveling alone. Made a few calls on his phone, but didn't say anything about you or Pooch."

"Good," Jensen said, though he hadn't really thought Stegler would screw them like that. The man had _nerve_ , yeah, but he wasn't the type for bullshit.

"So," Cougar said. "I'm tired of talking. It's your turn. What have you been doing all year?"

 _Oh, man_. Jensen didn't know where to start. But fair was fair.

He started talking.

\---

Jensen hadn't exactly mastered brevity. By the time his story was finished, the sky was dark, and they'd already moved from coffee to beer, hours ago.

Cougar looked _drunk_ , his eyes were swimming, drowsing shut, and Jensen wondered what his tolerance was, these days.

The conversation wound down, then, and Cougar looked tired, staring at the television, still on low in the background. They were repeating highlights, apparently, from the Goliath press conference, but Jensen couldn't be bothered to pay attention.

"Okay," he announced. "I'm beat, you're beat, and this bed's a king size. Promise not to have any repeats of Mazatlan if you want to crash out here."

\---

Cougar gave it some thought. Most of the time, when he grew tired, it was simpler to disperse himself, become a ghost, but once in a while…

He hadn't slept in a bed in nearly a week, now. His body needed rest.

Decision made, he kicked off his boots and lay back on the left side of the bed, closing his eyes and listening to Jensen get ready for sleep.

Pausing as he reached to turn out the light, Jensen turned to look at him. "I _missed_ you man. It's _embarrassing_ how much."

His eyes, though. They were almost too much, even as the lights went out. They'd _burned_ right through him, in the way that would show him everything, rather than nothing.

Cougar couldn't feel his chest anymore. Wasn't sure it was still there.

But he wasn't a fucking coward, so he forced himself back into place. It was easier to think, to _plan_ , when the stuff that comprised his brain were lined up next to each other.

He wanted to return this, to say that he'd missed Jensen, too, but there wasn't balance, there, and he knew it. Truth be told, he'd been fighting to hold himself together, literally, while Jensen had been doing so figuratively. He hadn't had the time, for the first few months, to be lonely. Sad. Anything at all resembling human.

And yeah, maybe Cougar'd fixated on him a bit. Called him a destination, and spent months homing in on him. He'd missed him. He'd missed all of them, he'd mourned them. But he hadn't mourned Jensen, not for a minute.

Because the possibility that Jensen could possibly be dead hadn't been an option. Never occurred to him.

But he hadn't _known_ that Jensen was _alive_ , either. Hadn't even questioned it. He'd just known it to be so, taken it for granted. Planned his life around it, for months.

Despite Jensen's usual lack of self-preservation.

Despite the fact that he'd expected to find everyone else dead.

Despite the fact that the explosion that caused all this very well could've started a war. That _would_ have, if six or seven hadn't already been going on.

"Jensen?"

"Yeah?"

"Why didn't the world end? When the bomb went off?"

"What do you mean?" Jensen asked, but Cougar can see him, working it out. "Fuck. An explosion? There? Fuck, you're right. I mean. _How_ many wars are going on out there?" He stood up, started pacing the narrow strip of carpet between the bed and the wall. "There was _barely_ any escalation," he scrunched his forehead. "I don't think. Can't remember, to be sure" he said, apologetically. "Those first few months were kind of a blur."

Cougar nodded, watching Jensen's fingers twitch, catching every longing glance towards the laptop sitting on the desk. It only took a minute for him to give in, grimly determined. "I'll find out." He sat down, tapped a few keys, focused, and got to work.

And maybe, Cougar reasoned, maybe this was why he'd sought Jensen out, all along.

Cougar fell in love, then, and then he fell out of the room.

\---


	4. Chapter 4

Jensen was still typing when Cougar came back, he hadn't even noticed that he'd gone. It was  
just as well. Realization of fact- that he was in fucking _love_ \- didn't mean he wanted to fucking _talk_ about it. No way in hell.

The dread fit just as well as it used to, like the feeling he used to get before the missions that inevitably followed his premonitions south. He could barely keep his body from dispersing into nothing all over again, just to get some relief from the tightness in his chest, the tension in his arms.

He'd come here looking for answers. Falling for his best friend hadn't been part of the fucking plan, just like _detonating a bomb_ hadn't been part of the plan.

 _But you managed it just fine. Considered it the optimal damn solution. It was easy, at the end, to not even try hoping that the others would clear the blast radius. Just to get the voices to stop, to stop hurting, to just stop everything_.

And now Jensen was sitting there, in front of the only source of light in the room, with his back to Cougar like he _trusted_ him.

Cougar wanted to strangle him, stop the incessant humming- some pop tune that Cougar recognized but couldn't place- and stop this before it got any worse. Because that's what snipers did. _One shot to kill the crisis._

 _No. Wait. Think._

If it weren't for the fact he'd be shooting his one chance of getting any answers straight through the heart, it would be easy to vanish so completely that Jensen would never find him again.

 _Just go. Leave. Now_.

But then Jensen turned to squint at him through the darkness, still wearing that distracted grin, like the nearest _thought_ of dying was a million miles away, like he was glad to see him.

Cougar couldn't move. He looked back at Jensen and took a breath, and wondered just how badly this was going to bite them both in the ass.

\---

It wasn't until three in the morning that Jensen blinked up from the laptop to find that the screen had burned its imprint into his retinas. Rolling his neck, he turned around to peer past the light-spots to see if Cougar was still awake.

 _If he's still there_ , his brain insisted on adding, and Jensen was all too happy to give his brain the finger when it was proven wrong.

"You okay?" he asked, because not only was Cougar there, he was staring at him, with eyes that were a little haunted for a _ghost_ , and wearing a frown that Jensen wished he didn't remember as clearly as he did.

"Sí," Cougar's gaze slid away, towards the far wall.

Jensen wanted to ask him if he still saw the kids, still smelled the fire from the helicopter coming down, even now. He wanted to tell him that he got it now, kind of, what it felt like to see lost faces, and that he wished that Cougar could've brought the kids back from the dead with him. Picked them up on his way back to life, or whatever.

He wanted to tell him everything was okay, but that was bullshit and bravado, and by the time Jensen opened his mouth again, Cougar'd found his poker face again, anyway. So Jensen did the next best thing. Because his research, what he'd found? It was actually kind of cool.

\---

For a horrifying minute, Jensen was looking at him like he was able to read every thought he'd ever had, but then the grin came up, mischievous and _on_ again, and he was waving vaguely in the direction of his computer.

"So it turns out, you didn't start any wars because you pretty much _stopped_ three of them. Well. Okay. You caused more cease-fires, by accident, than an _army_ of diplomats could've managed in a lifetime." Jensen scratched his head. "Course, they all started falling apart pretty quick, but there was a good month or two where the Middle East wasn't the most terrifying place on the entire planet. Everybody was too busy launching investigations to actually get battle plans in order, but _still_."

"Cool." Despite himself, he was grinning, and if Jensen figured it was because of the news, then so much the better.

"Funny thing is," Jensen leaned back, crossing his arms, because apparently it wasn't the humorous kind of funny. "Now that Goliath's been identified as the original source, everyone's smelling blood in the water. It's gonna get bad again, real fast."

 _Of course it is_. Cougar's fingers twitched.

"It's weird, right?" Jensen stood up, closing the laptop. "Feel like we're supposed to be waiting for our orders, or something. The next mission from on high, and I mean, hell, with your new superpowers, and everything, you'd be pretty much unstoppable."

Cougar shrugged, glad for the sudden darkness. It meant Jensen couldn't read his face, couldn't see that he hadn't actually given it any thought, hadn't considered returning to the fight for even a second.

"What about you?" he asked instead, once Jensen was stretched out on the bed next to him.

"What _about_ me?"

"You want back in?"

Jensen was quiet for a long while, and Cougar wasn't certain that he hadn't nodded off, but eventually, he answered.

"Dunno, really. I mean, it's not like I'm gonna sign back up with Stegler or anything, but. It's been a long year. Like, ten senior years rolled all into one. Just been fucking around, you know? Not saying I miss it, but. I guess I'm not saying I'm _not_. Entirely. Though you mention that to anyone and I'll deny the hell out of it. What about you?"

Right now, there was no way in hell he'd be able to answer that, not with Jensen lying there, right next to him, close enough that he could nearly feel the heat coming off of him, far enough away that he'd have to reach over to touch him, and the very fact that it occurred to him to even consider it was, well.

He had to focus, had to answer the question. "I'm tired."

The mattress shifted a little bit, Cougar could feel Jensen's nod. "Yeah, man. That's cool." Jensen yawned, misunderstanding him completely. "Think I could sleep for years."

\---

The only proof Jensen had that Cougar had slept at all came when he was half-woken up by Cougar getting out of bed. The alarm clock on the nightstand read 4:37, and through the crack in the curtains, the sky was already beginning to lighten.

Inside, though, it was still mostly too dark to see, and his lids were still heavy, so Jensen listened with his eyes closed

He could hear Cougar's breathing- ragged, short- and then the bathroom door closing slowly. Afterwards came the sound of the faucet, the tap barely opened. Once it shut off, all was quiet.

It stayed that way for a long while. Squinting over at the clock again, it was just past five, and he was beginning to think that Cougar had vanished again when he heard the door being eased quietly open.

Jensen wondered if he was going to crash out again, but apparently he'd chosen the chair by the window instead, and _this_ , Jensen remembered. It was a million middle-of-the-nights, Cougar waking up and trying not to wake the others when the nightmares got too bad. It was Jensen, pretending to still be sleeping so Cougar didn't have to worry about witnesses. And it was still ridiculous, not knowing who was protecting who from the nightmares, but the pattern had been set years ago, and Jensen didn't really know how to break it.

It sucked, though. Somehow, he'd assumed they would've gone away.

\---

If Jensen didn't stop flipping through the channels at a hundred miles an hour, Cougar was going to kill him. His fingers _itched_ for a trigger.

"So now what?" Jensen asked, out of _nowhere_. The guy could be like a dog with a bone, sometimes, but at least he was setting the remote aside. "What're you going to do with your life? I mean, I'm not, like, superstitious or anything, but it's got to feel like there's some grand reason for you to be here. Have you thought about fighting crime? You should fight crime. I mean, you've got the superpowers now, all you need is a cape. And hell, Cougar is a great superhero name, you'd be great. All you need is a training montage while you learn about your freaky mutant abilities."

And there was that awful fluttering in his stomach again. Most of the time, when Cougar kept silent, it was because there was no point in speaking, but sometimes, it was because he couldn't find the words. He forced an easy grin, thinking it should've been harder to maintain, and played along a little while longer.

"It's why I came here, isn't it? You read all those comics, I figured you were the expert."

Jensen was supposed to joke at that, but his face turned serious, monotone. "I have, you know. I've read a lot of them. And from what I've seen, it means that I'm just as easily the guy who will throw you in a lab and start running tests on you. Is that what you want? I could steal a lab. Get some, I don't know. Science things…"

Cougar rolled his eyes, and Jensen laughed, shrugging it off and intoning, "We _have_ the _technology_ …well, we will, anyway."

"You break into MIT again, Clay's not going to be around to bail your ass out."

Jensen's grin faded at that, and he shrugged. "Okay, so I won't. But only if you come down to the beach and let me throw rocks at you."

Cougar blinked. "Why?"

"Come on," Jensen jumped to his feet, clapping his hands together as he began to search for his shoes. "Me. You. Beach. Research montage."

Only Jensen could make a stoning sound like a date, and since Cougar was used to dooming himself, he said yes.

\---

Jensen wouldn't stop singing about the _eye of the Cougar_ until they'd made it past the last phalanx of sunbathing tourists.

When Cougar sidled away, trying to get some distance between his eardrums and the caterwauling, Jensen only yelled louder.

"Let he who has a handful of rocks cast the first stone," was all the warning Jensen gave when they arrived, but Cougar had vanished by the time he'd finished his wind-up.

"Good response time," Jensen nodded, reaching into his bag for a tattered shirt. "You want to try it blindfolded?"

\---

The family with the shrieking kids had forced them to move down the beach and out of sight, but it was just as well. With Cougar leading the way, he couldn't see Jensen reaching into his bag.

Jensen was pretty sure the irate glare reappeared first, followed by Cougar's face and arms, and he wasn't entirely sure that the legs were there before the air-horn was ripped from his hands and thrown into the ocean.

\---

"Dunno, man. I would've thought if you were going to be- what, I don't know- _reincarnated_. Or whatever. With superpowers, you would've come back as, like, a werewolf or something. A were _cat_."

Cougar frowned at the sudden conversational shift. "Why? That's stupid."

"So is turning into a freaking invisible _cloud_ whenever you get startled. Your superpowers suck," Jensen tried to scowl, but it didn't quite work. Any second now, the corner of his mouth would break free, up into a wild grin that was already showing in his eyes.

 _Mi vida_.

Falling in deeper, Cougar hoped Jensen couldn't hear the manic edge to his laugh.

"Estás celoso," he accused, before something worse could come out. _Anything_ , to just move past this.

"Damned _right_ I'm jealous," Jensen said, his attention finally returning to his computer. "Doesn't mean it's not still _completely_ fucking ridiculous."

\---

Jensen had to admit being a little more impressed when Cougar proved he could take things with him when he vanished, but he still checked over his laptop when it was returned.

"Quit looking so smug, man. I swear, man, if the hard drive's fried, I will _end_ you."

\---

The tide was going out when Jensen called Cougar back from the water line.

"Okay!" he adjusted the screen of his laptop. "What I want you to do now is see how far you can cast yourself out when you're invisible. When you pull yourself in, tell me what you see.."

Cougar nodded, closing his eyes and stretching himself out. Over the beach, first, and was reading the screen, shifting around all the grains of sand as the wind pushed him up, over and through the trees. Over the boardwalk and through the first row of buildings, then the second.

His mind began to wander as he dispersed. A thousand people, more, and the projection room of the theater. Heavier traffic, now, while blocks away a man was frying eggs in his apartment. Kids were playing soccer while on the other side of the block, a man was bleeding to death. A trio of forty-something women, on the other side of the island, were flirting with the waiter as they ordered their drinks, and the wind was trying to move him faster, now.

The hospital was amazing and horrific all at once, and the meditation class in the park to the south was just wrapping things up. He could hear both ends of at least thirty cell phone conversations, and they weren't as varied as he would've thought.

He was spanned halfway across the island, now, and it was too much at once, every part of himself being aware of everything else. The overload was becoming unbearable, and he couldn't feel pain like this, not really, but he didn't know what else to call it.

He began pulling himself back together, and when the wind changed, dragging him sideways, he noticed something new. _There_.

Gun in the waistband. Eyes out, searching.

 _Hijo de puta_.  
\---

Jensen was pulling up the mapping program when he noticed Cougar suddenly there, staring back at the boardwalk. A stunned frown slashed across his face. and apparently instincts didn't die, they just went dormant. Jensen froze, swiveled his head, trying to follow.

"What is it?"

Still searching out the threat, Cougar tipped his head in his direction, his eyes landing, briefly, on Jensen.

"Aisha's here."

\---


	5. Chapter 5

"Tienes un arma?" Cougar asked, still staring back down the beach.

"No, man," Jensen winced. "Ditched the guns a few months back. Too much hassle to travel with. You?"

"Didn't think I'd need one." Cougar rocked his head back, his grin bitter. "Vámonos."

Cougar flexed his fingers and Jensen wondered, not for the first time, what kind of shot he was these days. It had been on the list of things he wanted to test, but nowhere near the top ten.

"Okay," Jensen brushed the sand off his bag, and when he looked up, Cougar was starting to fade out. Blinking, he caught on. "Don't go far," and an instant later, he might as well have been alone.

\---

This was the kind of thing that would've been useful, once upon a time. Keeping Jensen as his center, Cougar spread himself out a few blocks in every direction. Going further out would've just caused confusion. Otherwise, though, it was familiar, keeping Jensen in his sights while scanning for threats.

He found none. It was more unsettling than he would've thought.

\---

"So wait," Jensen asked, as he drew the curtains shut. "You mean to tell me you haven't shot a gun in over a _year_?

Cougar shrugged. It didn't matter if Jensen seemed surprised to hear it. Odds were, he'd be taking it up again fairly soon, and it didn't matter right now, anyway.

\---

"What're we going to do?" Jensen rubbed at his neck. "It's not like we're players, any more. If he'd seen us once, she probably could've killed us already. Any time over the past year, she could've taken _my_ ass out, and it would've been easier than something that's really. Fucking. Easy."

He was right. It didn't make sense, none of this did.

Cougar shrugged, admitting to only about half of the concern he felt. "Maybe my eyes tricked me."

"I've seen you make impossible shots, a thousand yards through the jungle, man." Jensen said, ominously. "You saw it, it's there."

\---

The room proved to be clean, after a thorough bug sweep performed to the soundtrack of Jensen's complaints.

"Hey, man. I get it, I really do, but I chose this place at random and we moved fast. There's no way she could've prepped for us to show up here."

Cougar already knew as much, but it was calming to hear it spoken aloud. For now, they were safe. And he had an errand to run.

Leaving Jensen in the hotel room, he vanished when he hit the stairwell, and slipped through the night and across the plaza. The police department was on the opposite corner of the park, and though Cougar didn't know much about security systems-that had always been Jensen's purview- he had an easy time, getting through.

He had to wait a while for the locker room to clear out, but as soon as the shift change was completed, and the officers had left, he began to search.

The Glock 22 came first, but he had to dig around to find the ammunition, and wound up grabbing two extra magazines from the nearby lockers. It was solid enough, dependable, but it wouldn't be enough.

It was down in the evidence lockup that he finally found something capable of longer range, an M86 that needed, badly, to be cleaned. The scope was one of the older Ospreys. Functional, but nothing like the illuminated rangefinder he'd had before.

But it would have to do, for now at least. He could trade up later.

\---

Resisting the urge to stand at the window, looking out for something he knew he'd never see, Jensen paced the room and tried to fucking _think_.

Odds were, he would only have one good shot at searching anything out before his presence was noticed. He had to make it count. Sitting down and starting a new IP address rotation on his computer, he tried to decide his approach.

 _How the hell do you track a ghost?_

It was funny enough that, were Cougar there, he might've smirked. Probably wouldn't have _laughed_ or anything, but still. Smirking, Jensen got to work.

Most of the security systems had been updated at least once in the past year, and the CIA databases were locked behind an _entirely_ new system, but once he was in, he found the interior security to be comparatively weak.

Even better, the old file paths still worked. On the edges, he could see the backtrackers working around him as he passed them by, onwards to what he needed. _Personnel, full history view, al-Fadhil, Aisha._

And surprise, surprise, give the lady a prize, there was nothing on file, anywhere, that indicated Aisha was still counted among the living. He was just starting to jump into Director Sanderson's notes regarding her last known standing when there was a knock at the door.

Grabbing the knife out of his boot, the same one he'd retrieved from Aisha's belongings, a year ago, he held it ready. Looking through the fish-eye lens, the hallway appeared bulbous and curved, and also very empty.

Why Cougar thought he had to knock, Jensen wasn't sure, but then he remembered. Rolling his eyes, he opened the door, saying " _Christ_ , man, you seriously think I'd be jerking off at a time like-" and then he saw it, down on the floor. A wadded up piece of paper that hadn't been there before.

He may have poked it with his knife before carefully opening it. As soon as the corner was pulled away enough to see, he grabbed it, quickly, and darted back into the room.

After that, he just stared at the bloody ear for a while. Tried not to stare at the congealed dirty blood worked into the whorls, not to notice the jagged tears where the knife had met resistance. He kind of wanted to cry.

\---

"…I mean, she could've killed me _right then_ , if she'd wanted to, but instead she left this!"

Cougar stared at the ear on the table while Jensen finished explaining how it had arrived, but he had only one thing he needed to know.

"This the first time you've been found?"

"Yeah, I mean. Stegler, the other day, came here following Pooch, from the looks of things."

It made sense. Even if anyone had known he'd survived, Jensen had been a moving target. Pooch, on the other hand, had done what he could to protect his family, but he'd still gone back home. It hadn't been hard for Cougar to track him.

Stegler, with all his resources, would've had an easy time of it.

"Or." Jensen ran a hand through his hair. "For all I know, _Stegler_ could have been followed."

Cougar nodded. It was a standard risk. There'd always been that chance, that much, at least, hadn't changed.

"So here's the thing," Jensen said, awkwardly. "I spent a good part of the year being sloppy drunk. Someone wanted to make a move on me, they could've. Easily. And they didn't, which leads me to believe…"

Relieved that Jensen had figured it out himself, that he didn't need convincing, Cougar finished for him. "They're not here for you. I should leave, draw them out." He was careful to speak casually, to make it sound like this was just another op. Risk minimization. Standard protocol, nothing to worry about. No big deal.

"Yeah," Jensen was scowling, knowing the game all too well. "Sucks _balls_ , man, but. Yeah. Probably a good idea." He fixed Cougar with a strange look, like he was going to say more, but then something flashed across his eyes, and he sat up. It was only when he began speaking that Cougar recognized it as determination.

"Okay. Fine. This is what's going to happen. We run this like we did Munich," Jensen waved him back into the chair as he opened his computer's calendar. "Only _this_ time, we're not picking a city in advance." Swiveling his eyes back to Cougar, he snapped his fingers a few times, fidgeting as he thought. He was making it up as he went along.

"On October seventh, watch the afternoon departures at O'Hare airport for a last minute delay of an outbound flight due to a navigation malfunction. Another day after that, that's where we'll meet up. Get to the library, find the note."

"You will leave it in the same book?"

"Yeah. I'll have a good chunk of this figured out by then. That work?"

Cougar turned the plan over in his head. It wasn't a guarantee that both of them would survive the next month, but it was better than the one he'd come up with, which had, more or less, been _Leave. Disappear. And don't look back_.

"Sí."

"Okay. Emergencies only. And by emergencies, we're talkin' _I'm staring down another nuke_ or _Aisha's already got one ear, and she's coming back to complete the set_ , you hear?" Jensen reached into his bag, grabbing a phone and tossing it over to him.

Cougar turned it on and found Jensen's phone number, already programmed in, and really, suddenly, that was the end of it. They were good to go, and the sooner they parted ways, the better their odds were of getting through this unscathed.

It should've been easy, he'd very nearly talked himself into disappearing once already. But that had been on his own quiet terms. This was something else _completely_ , it had Jensen edging towards the window again, peeking carefully through the drawn curtains at the street outside.

 _He'll be safer once you've gone._

 _But mierda, just in case_.

He stood up, brushing his hands on his jeans, the noise alerting Jensen to his presence once more. Smirking, he reached out his hand, and when Jensen shook on it, he grabbed him in a quick hug that could've meant anything, that hopefully translated as nothing more than _hasta luego_.

\---

Jensen stared at the space where Cougar had been and wondered when it was that he had actually vanished. Not wanting to be so obvious, just in case the sneaky bastard _was_ still lurking around, he turned his attention again towards the street below.

He was just in time to see a familiar hat coming out of the hotel across the way and heading down the street. He wanted to watch longer, until he reached the corner, but if Cougar was being cautious enough to not give away Jensen's position, it would've been stupid to blow it himself. He let the curtain fall shut, and turned back to the room.

Nothing there but his bag, his laptop, the Glock Cougs had left him, and somebody's ear.

If he went online right now, he could pull up the surveillance down at the airport, and down at the docks, and he could probably catch sight of him. That was the entire fucking point, after all, of this Pied Motherfucking Piper act Cougar was playing.

 _Christ man, only it's been two minutes_.

In a few hours, maybe in London, or Dubai, or, who knew, DC maybe, a CCTV camera would pick up his face. Somewhere in the mechanisms in the world, it would be filtered through facial recognition, and the chase would really be on.

If Jensen went looking for it, he could blow the entire game right now. The entire point of this was to _not_ know.

He considered the ear again, and this time, when his fingers twitched, he honestly didn't know if they were searching out keys or triggers. He had to move out and move on. Get gone.

\---

Cougar stayed mostly out of sight, stopping off down at the shipyard first, where he was careful to walk in the shadows, right through the path of a security camera he probably wasn't supposed to notice.

He paused, near a group of tourists who were regrouping before getting back on their cruise ship, and gave it a few minutes.

Once he was sure that if anyone had been there to spot him, they would have by now, he followed them towards the gangplank and fell to the back of the group before disappearing.

A few minutes later, heading inland again, he saw her.

Aisha's ponytail was sleek, this time, longer than before, and she stalked just as plainly as she'd done before, eyes scanning the shadows. Her eyes were no different, now. Harder, maybe, and they looked right through him as she continued on, down towards the ship.

Less than an hour later, Cougar was on a flight to Florida. The plane ascended above the resorts and restaurants and beaches as it turned to find its course, and if Cougar wasn't very careful, he could fall back down into it all.

Maybe, if he landed right, he could be back in that hotel room, with Jensen.

And if he didn't materialize, if he remained cast out over the air, invisible and weightless, Jensen might never know he was there.

And in a few hours, Aisha wouldn't know that he'd been spotted in a Florida airport, getting on a plane to who knows where. She'd redouble her search of the city. Maybe even find Jensen again.

And this entire thing would've been for nothing, anyway.

\---

It was his third hotel room in twenty-four hours, and it was surprisingly depressing, knowing that he was going to be the only one using it. At least there wouldn't be time to build up stupid sentimental attachments to the place, this time around.

Cougar, this time, didn't materialize out of thin air. It kind of sucked.

Besides, he had work to do.

Stegler had left his card, with a penciled-in number scrawled across the back. Jensen went online and searched the number out, found that it belonged to a pre-paid phone, a burner, like the one Jensen'd been carting all over the world for months now.

 _Call. Don't Call. Call. Fuck._

The reality was this: a really unpleasant answer was still an answer, nonetheless, and a terrible plan was still a plan. And Stegler, for his part, hadn't screwed them over. Jensen dialed the number and tried not to think of the word _yet_.

He picked up on the third ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey, man, it's Jake. Ah. Jensen. This a good time?"

"I've got ten minutes," Stegler said. "I'm on my way to inform an associate's widow that her husband died in the service of our great country, and to try talking around the fact that his body, once it arrives, will be short two years."

"Shit," Jensen said. "Antigua?"

"Just a few hours ago." Stegler cleared his throat. "I'm assuming you're not calling unrelatedly."

"Yeah, well. I might be able to help you out on that one. See, I've got one of the ears, here. It seems to have been donated by a mutual, ah. Well. Far as I can tell, Aisha is back in business."

"Really," Stegler said, his voice cool, but only just barely. "You're sure it's not a fake-out?"

"Nah, man, pretty sure I spotted her, earlier today. Wasn't sure until I found her calling card."

"I hadn't _thought_ that was your style."

Jensen let go the breath he'd been holding. "Yeah, ah. No. Not even a little. But that's why I'm calling, you know anything about what she's been up to? Or how, you know, why she's _alive_?"

"I don't know that she _is_ , at this point, Jake. But I'll do some digging and get back to you. You spotting her, and my contact turning up dead can't be a coincidence. Is this a safe line?"

"It's golden," Jensen confirmed. "And look, man, I really appreciate it, but I gotta ask. I'm back in, for now, but it's not for the long haul. This isn't me signing up for a new mission."

"It's cleaning up an old one. I hear you. Figure if I ever get out of here, I'll have a few of those myself. Though I must admit, as far as loose ends go, Aisha?" There was a rush of air over the phone, either a snort or a sigh. "How she survived a nuclear goddamned _explosion_ is something that I'm not looking forward to explaining to the brass."

Jensen bit back a _wait until you see Cougar_ , because honestly? The less information that got out, the better. So he deflected. "Yeah, well, it's not like I came back and reported in the moment I cleared that scene myself, so..." Jensen rolled his neck, glancing again at the window.

"True, but my _point_ was actually that we should play this one close. I'm keeping it between us until we have a better idea what's going on, and I'll keep your name out of it as long as I can. Getting the company in on it will probably just muddy the waters."

"Good," Jensen was relieved. "I owe you one, man. And look, about the other day…I was a total dick."

"We're good," Stegler said. "Showing up like that, I'm probably lucky I didn't wind up taking a bullet to the head."

"Well, you know," Jensen smirked. "You've got to be an optimist. There's always tomorrow."

He could _hear_ him rolling his eyes over the phone. "Bye, Jensen."

\---

Jensen hung up the phone. He'd found what he could. He'd talked to Stegler. It was nearly midnight, now, and it was probably time to get the hell out of Antigua. As soon as he figured out where the hell to go. First, he had to make sure his path was clear.

It wasn't hard to get access to the airport's security footage from this evening. It was several hours, though, before he was able to catch Aisha heading through the ticketing lines, her phone pressed to her ear as she waited. By the time she reached the counter, she'd ended the call, and Jensen had accessed the airline's ticketing system.

Station number six was in the midst of changing tickets from Trinidad to Miami. The ticket was obscenely expensive, and the bitch paid in cash.

There was no way to tell who was bankrolling her. And no way to tell, really, how she'd picked her destination. No way to tell if Cougar had shaken her, yet, or if she was on his tail.

Odds were, Jensen wouldn't get any more answers than he already had, but he watched her, anyway, just in case.

Maybe she was concerned that she'd be followed. Maybe it was just habit, like checking under your car for a bomb before climbing inside. It didn't necessarily mean anything, but she stopped at the third gate in the terminal, but didn't board when the flight was called. Instead, half an hour later, she slid from her seat and made her way to the boarding area a few gates down, and got on the Miami bound plane.

So the heat would be on in Miami. That was fine, Jensen _hated_ Florida, ever since the trip to Disney World. _Served that Donald Duck motherfucker right, though. Squawking bastard had that kick to the balls coming, dancing around like that_.

If Aisha was heading there, odds were, Cougar had already arrived.

He considered pulling up Miami's security footage to see if he could spot him coming off the plane. Find out where he was going, next.

But, if Cougar was smart- and this, here, this was something Cougar had been amazing at even _before_ joining the X-Men- he wouldn't be making himself known, any time soon.

Still, though. Right now, at the moment, at least, the digital coast was clear. Jensen could check, if he wanted to. A few keystrokes, and it would be _so_ damned easy to find him.

Instead, Jensen booked a ticket for London, shut the computer down, and packed up his life again. Everything but the Glock.

Aisha was gone, so he probably didn't need it any more.   

And getting guns into England was a bigger pain in the ass than talking your way out of a Serbian holding cell.

And he'd only had it for three or four hours, now. That wasn't enough time to develop some bullshit sentimental attachment. He'd always preferred Rugers, anyway.

And it wasn't like he wouldn't be able to replace it, if and- yeah, it was looking like _when_ , now- he needed to.

But Cougar had gone and grabbed it for him. Had materialized in the middle of the room with it in his hand. It had gone from existence to nonexistence to back again right with him, and it was totally fucking stupid, but maybe it had been imperfect, incomplete. Maybe Cougar had left a molecule of himself mixed in with the metal.

He'd have to leave it behind in the morning. Ditch it in some trashcan on the way to the airport. Right now, though, he could lie here, hanging onto it for everything he was worth, and pretend that all of this was normal.

\---


	6. Chapter 6

Some nights, Cougar slept, and some nights he stretched himself so thin that he could see an entire village at once. The latter proved more restful, but it was too easy a habit to fall into, becoming a ghost. Most nights, he'd simply drift through walls until he found an empty hotel room, and lay down on the bed until the nightmares came. When they did, he'd sit and stare out the window picturing explosions falling from the sky for hours, until the eventually resolved themselves into the rising sun.

Sometimes he'd vanish into the ocean for days on end, but it felt like cheating.

\---

The first time he'd ever had the dream, too many long insane hours after the children had fallen, he'd woken in the back of a truck to find Roque and Jensen shouting his name, shaking him awake as they flew over the rough road.

After that, it was variations on a theme. Clay, in the corner with a bottle of whiskey that he'd pass over. Roque grumbling and turning over, telling him to go back to sleep. Pooch was the worst, always asking him if he wanted to talk about it, concerned and tired-eyed. Most of the time, though, it was Jensen, who just slept through it all.

He bunked with Jensen whenever he could, right up through the end. _After_ the end, he'd thought the nightmares had been killed in the blast, to the point where they were just memories. He'd even begun to hope that maybe the past was finally done with him.

Antigua changed that, though, on so many levels. Maybe it was the familiarity, maybe it was something that Jensen had said that knocked the memories loose. Maybe it was just being on the run again.

The nightmare hadn't changed much, though the blast at the end, now, was bright enough to blind out the rest of existence, leaving him scrabbling blindly for tiny vaporized hands. They still burned when he found them, but he could no longer grasp them, and the new silence that followed was worse than the roar of the burning wreckage had ever been.

And now, when he awoke, his eyes opened to an empty room. No whiskey, no complaints, no questions, and nobody sprawled snoring with their glasses in their hand.

\---

In Prague, Aisha walked right through him, her phone to her ear, talking angrily.

"I'm less than two hours behind him. It's the closest I've been in a _month_. If the money had been deposited when it was _supposed_ to, I could've been on the same _plane_ , but that's just water under the bridge, now, isn't it? He _has_ to know I'm still tailing him."

When she turned the corner, he followed, listening as she stalked into the plaza. "Of course, Mister Borodin, but if I find you hobbling me in this fashion again, I am certain that I will find Goliath's competitors much more amenable to honoring their agreements. Is that understood?"

After she finished the call, Cougar followed her for three hours, waiting to see if he could learn anything more. Eventually, though, she checked into a hotel. She perched on the edge of the bed, methodically stripping down the gun she'd bought down in the warehouse district, and there wasn't anything more to see that he didn't already know.

Cougar eased through the wall of the first empty storefront he could find. The phone was for emergencies only.

This counted.

It had been nearly two weeks, and dialing Jensen's number should've been easy.

\---

"Cougs?" Jensen sounded worried. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Have information for you."

"Oh, man, my nipples are getting hard. Whatcha got for me?"

There was nobody here to see him. Cougar could smile if he wanted to. "Aisha's working with Goliath, contact's a guy named Borodin. Heard her on the phone."

"So she _is_ still after you, then. Shit. I was kind of hoping she'd gotten bored, you know?"

"Sí. What about you, have any luck?"

"Not much, I'm packing right now, getting on a flight to meet up with Stegler first thing tomorrow," Jensen said. "Hey, you know that ear? Belonged to one of Stegler's inside guys at Goliath."

Still trying to catch up, Cougar didn't respond, but Jensen didn't seem to be waiting for one. "So. If she's gone over to Goliath, now, well. That _would_ explain why she took the double agent out, wouldn't it? Not that she ever needed a motive beyond, _hey, it's Tuesday!_ , but hey, it's a start, right? Is she still hot? Because _man_ for a crazy bitch, she could wear the hell out of some-"

"Hang on, you re-upped?" He didn't know why, but the thought of it made him uneasy.

"Ah. Yeah. I mean, it's just for the short term." Jensen obviously wasn't enthusiastic, either about the idea itself, or admitting it. "One gig only. Stegler's got resources, I'm out of the loop, and-"

"Good idea," Cougar assented, covering his sudden irritation. Stegler was a good guy. He'd gone out on a limb for them more than once and had been holding his own longer than anyone. More importantly, he had Jensen's back. It was stupid, unprofessional, to feel jealous. "Is there a plan, yet?"

"Hoping to have one in a few days, that's why we're getting together. Ah. I'll call you if we get something that we can move on, otherwise, we'll meet up at the time we agreed on, is that cool?"

Cougar nodded. In a minute, he'd hang up, but in the meantime, maybe, if he was lucky, Jensen would keep talking for just a little while.

\---

At the outset, all they managed to agree on was the fact that they'd need to find someone to replace Eric Marsden, the dead earless wonder, Stegler's inside man.

Stegler had rented out an office in London. Small, unimpressive, but the building was secure and it had all the resources Jensen could've wanted, and a bunch that he didn't need. Jensen spent the first day or so stripping and rebuilding the computer that Stegler had provided, wiping the operating system clean and building it from the ground up, and really, he only needed Stegler for his passwords.

Cougar's intel only complicated things, at this point. If Marsden had been hit because Aisha had been following Stegler, and discovered Marsden's double-dealings, that was one thing. If, however, she'd been following Marsden at Goliath's instruction, it meant Goliath was a hundred times more prepared than Stegler had thought.

It didn't matter, now, though. Jensen had done what he could, breaking in to Goliath's systems, pulling HR files and emails and financials- anything that looked at all relevant. It was clear that they'd known about Marsden's death- a boating accident in Antigua, they were calling it- several hours before he'd actually died.

Borodin, Aisha's contact, was even more confusing. It was probably an alias. Jensen found nothing in Goliath's HR files, no job title, no contact information, _nothing_. He'd been assigned an email address, though, about five months back.

The account had only been accessed on three occasions, all of which were in the past month, and beyond the fact that Borodin had sent the messages via web mail from public computers, none of the messages were at all revealing.

 _Are you ready?_ the first one asked, and he'd answered _yes_. The second, a few days later, confirmed that he'd be leaving that week. The third, a few days before Marsden's accident had been announced, showed that he hadn't yet made contact with someone, presumably Aisha. There were no other messages, but there didn't need to be.

Because Jensen? Jensen was a fucking genius with a lot of time on his hands.

\---

"Have any luck?" Stegler asked wearily, suddenly hovering in the doorway with a cup of coffee in his hand.

Jensen glanced up at the clock. He'd been at it for thirteen hours straight now, on top of yesterday's seven. Some evil bastard had come in and sandblasted his eyeballs a few hours ago. He didn't know exactly when he'd be capable of straightening his spine again, and his hands, he figured, were a loss, splayed useless appendages hanging off his wrists. When he stood to stretch, he discovered that everything below his ass had fallen into a light coma, and he lurched as he crossed the room.

He'd make a great henchman, though. It was almost a shame Stegler wasn't a criminal mastermind.

Still, though, this was _kind_ of like henching.

"Took a while, but I got a lock on the locations where Borodin sent the emails. Nothing useful, really, they're all internet café's and a public library. But. The first time he was in, he accessed a database on Goliath's system."

"What was he doing?"

"No idea," Jensen waved at the screen. "There's layers and layers of encryption on this thing, I didn't get in until a while ago, and managed to pull it all down, but. Here's the thing. It's just numbers," he waved Stegler over to the computer to show him. "It looks almost like it's set up like a spreadsheet, but all eleven column headers are missing. Wherever the key is, it's not stored on this system."

"Shit."

"No kidding. Anyway. I've got a decent chunk of it being processed out over there," he stuck a thumb in the direction of his laptop. "Trying to see if there's any relations between the numbers that might tell us something."

"Okay, good," Stegler said, wearing the usual semi-boggled expression that arose whenever he had to examine anything that didn't have a narrative. Jensen suspected the man still had a typewriter in his main office.

\---

 _Fuck_ , this was getting old.

The number crunching came up with miles of data, none of it useful, and for the most part, Jensen was at a dead end. There was no way they were going to get any further without walking into Goliath and hardwiring a connection. Not unless they had someone who could do it for them.

Stegler had been going through the personnel files, looking for prospective contacts, comparing clearance, management reviews, payroll, history, and everything else he could get his hands on. It was the exact sort of qualitative task that Jensen himself had no patience for, though he never mentioned it.

Mostly because he didn't have to. By the time he reached the chorus, Stegler had very kindly kicked him, his lovely singing voice, and his laptop out of the office.

It was a relief, mostly, but he pretended to more irritation than he felt, singing as he went down the stairs.

" _And I would hack five thousand files, and I would hack five thousand more  
To be the man who hacked a thousand files and sent your boss that porn…_"

\---

Another hotel room, this week, mostly done up in greens and grays, but bouncing between too focused and too tired, Jensen hadn't noticed until now. It was fucking _ugly_ in here. He wanted out, thought about hitting the pub he passed on the way to the hotel, about all the people he'd seen inside, the redhead sitting with her girlfriends in the window, unaware that she'd rucked up her skirt as she'd sat down.

There was a lot Jensen could've done with that, if he'd been feeling up to it, but he'd kept walking. It would've been more fun with a wingman, someone to distract the girlfriends, and Stegler wasn't really the sort who would've been down to help a guy out.

The laptop was running every number crunching and data-mining program he could think of, just in case. For the most part, as soon as the programs were cued up, he could just let them go do their thing. All he needed to do was check the results when they finished.

Which was why he was mere _inches_ away from losing his twitchy _mind_ and staring at the wallpaper, deciding that it was the exact same shade of green as the redhead's skirt. Which was just as well, because he'd walked past less than half an hour ago, and couldn't remember- at all- what her face had looked like.

\---

When Jensen slept, he dreamt about the convenience store he'd worked at in high school, of trying to ring up customer after customer after customer, while the register spat out emails instead of receipts, and giving ammunition out as change, instead of quarters and pennies. In the dreams, Cougar would be standing there, at the back of the line, with a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscrutable look on his face.

\---

It had been nearly a week since Cougar had called, and it was getting a little ridiculous, this constant needling _thing_ in the back of his head that made him want to go in, run facial recognition on every camera he could think of, airport after city street after taxi stand, and just _find_ the guy, already.

Cougar had been dead for a year. Only, well, _not_ , but Jensen hadn't known that, then. He'd done the mourning thing- he'd been crappy at it, but he'd done it- and it had been a hell of a lot easier than _waiting, not knowing_.

Cougar was out there, somewhere, with Aisha on his tail.

They called it a burner phone because of the hole it was searing through his pocket, and because of the sharp flinch of his fingers, moving away from the danger every time he took it out.

He hadn't known that, before, when he'd first signed up.

Three buttons, in the right sequence, and he'd have Cougar on the line. He shoved the phone back into his pocket for the seventh time in an hour.

\---

Cougar pushed his way through Harajuku Station and crossed over to Takeshita-Dori. It was easy to play the tourist, there, to pretend to be distracted by the colorful teenagers on parade, while scanning the area for any signs of Aisha.

It had been several days, now, since New Zealand, and he was starting to wonder if he'd done too good a job throwing her off the trail.

Staying ahead of her, just far enough that she wouldn't catch up, just near enough that she wouldn't abandon the chase, had given him a problem to solve, something to _do_ , something to keep his mind busy.

Because his thoughts, left to their own devices, were even more unnerving. Endless rounds of questions- _why am I here, why aren't I dead, what am I now_ \- jostling against the closest thing he had to an answer. _Jensen_.

An answer that was a question itself was no answer at all, really,

- _where is he, what's he doing, is he okay, what the hell is going on_ -

So he tried to stay focused. It had been five days, maybe six, since Aisha had vanished.

- _did she get bored, did she decide that Jensen was an easier target, why didn't I kill her when I had the chance?_

\---

Jensen should've thought of it a lot longer before he did, and really, he wasn't about to admit the basis of his inspiration any time soon.

After dinner- kebabs from down the street- he'd jerked off. It wasn't particularly satisfying. Part of him kept worrying that Cougar would materialize out of thin fucking air, right in the middle of it. Part of him, though, really _liked_ the idea, and his imagination had joined in, quite happily, even bringing along it's own backpack full of mental images.

Halfway through, he'd stopped pretending that he wasn't even trying not to think about Cougar's wiry muscles, the way he rolled his head to the side, exposing his neck when-

The shower was to clear his head, as much as anything. Afterwards, he opened up his laptop again to see if his niece had posted anything interesting on her Facebook page. Then his sister. Just the usual, totally mundane. A clip from the Daily show, an article from the local paper. The weather sucked.

He'd was getting really tired of missing people. Found himself wondering if Cougar'd ghosted back to check on his family at all.

And, _shit_. There it was.

 _Fuck_.

Aisha was after Cougar, a man who'd practically been a ninja _before_ he learned how to become invisible. She'd have a hard time tracking him, and wasn't exactly patient. She'd go after his family, if she thought she had to.

Jensen opened another tab in his browser and began to search, surprised when he found Cougar's family so easily.

They'd just made the news. Juarez. Murdered in their sleep, all of them. No witnesses, no survivors. Not even the baby.

\---


	7. Chapter 7

Five more days, and Cougar would be on his way to Chicago. Another day or so after that, he'd see Jensen again, and they'd be moving in to take action.

Cougar had never gotten the hang of Tokyo the way Roque or Jensen had, and it still made him tense. It was just the usual threats, with the usual local variations, but now included stores selling Hello Kitty crap by the ton.

Looking back on it now, Cougar knew he would've gotten shot on that job, either way, but the kitten bandages they'd found for him had been a bit much, and the "Hello Cougar" jokes had _definitely_ been.

It was easier to get Sashimi in the middle of the ocean than it was to get it on the end of his chopsticks, and but practicing gave him something to concentrate on _other_ than the fact that Aisha hadn't shown.

There was no way to know if he'd shaken her too well, or if she'd been recalled. Maybe Borodin, whoever the hell he was, had taken her seriously and they were meeting in an office somewhere, coming up with a new strategy.

Maybe he could go home, soon. At least start figuring out where the hell that was supposed to be. Juarez, maybe. Austin had been long enough ago that it wouldn't matter. Maybe Jensen would call him, soon, to say that the danger was gone, that it was all some big misunderstanding, and that Toronto was lovely, this time of year.

 _No diga sandeces._

By the time, later on, that he would've stopped to think about the coincidence, it would be only in terms that there was no such thing. It didn't stop him from jumping in his seat, startled by the vibration of the phone in his pocket. Jensen's name was on the caller ID.

\---

The relief he felt seeing that Jensen was calling was quickly squashed by the fact that Jensen was _calling_. Something was wrong.

"Qué pasa?" Cougar asked, wondering if this was how they'd always talk, now.

"Hey, man, ah. Look. I'm really sorry, but. It's your family." Cougar probably would've evaporated if he didn't need so badly to hear what came next. "Your grandmother, Hector, Marisa and Carlos. Somebody went after them three days ago. You got eyes on Aisha?" Jensen stopped himself, Cougar could feel him taking a breath on the other end of the line and wondered when his own body would remember to do likewise. Jensen, though, kept talking. "Fuck, That came out really badly. I mean. I'm sorry."

Cougar forced the air into his lungs and back out again. He was on mission, everything else had to wait a minute. _Esto primero_. "Haven't seen her in a week, either I lost her, or she gave up."

"I'll see what I can search out." Jensen's next words sounded even worse, answering the question Cougar hadn't yet had time to consider. "And, ah... I mean, I'm really fucking sorry, but. It looks like the funeral's tomorrow, and-."

Cougar closed his eyes, momentarily blocking out another pack giggling girls walking past, outside the window. "It's probably a trap," he realized, trying to keep Jensen on track. "Your sister's safe?"

"Yeah. Told her to go get groceries anyway. Calling Pooch and Jolene next," he said, leaving Cougar to supply the code for himself. _GeT FOOD. Get The Fuck Out Of Dodge._

He nodded into the phone, biting down on the fucked up anger at hearing that _they_ were safe while _he'd_ just lost everything. Finally. For good. "Is there anything else?"

"Ah. No. Stegler's going in to feel out a new inside man at Goliath, and I'm just sitting here spreading bad news." When Cougar didn't answer, he continued. "Look, man. I know we've got to be careful, and that I'll be seeing you next week, but if you want to talk, or whatever-"

Cougar wasn't sure, moments later, why he'd hung up then, cutting Jensen off mid-stream, but he didn't call him back, either.

\---

 _Wow. You fucked up._

Jensen was a big enough man to admit that he was kind of an asshole, even if he _was_ taken aback when Cougar hung up on him.

 _Smooth moves, Ex-Lax._

And the funny thing? He'd mostly called because he'd thought it would've sounded better coming from a friend. He'd rehearsed it in his head when he called his sister in a panic, telling her to go get groceries. Practiced it some more in the minute before he dialed Cougar's number.

 _Not enough, jackass. Again._

Because that was the thing, wasn't it? All this bullshit, wasting time on scrounged crumbs in hopes that at some point, they _might_ just figure out what the fuck Aisha was up to? Hell, even if she'd been sitting across the table from him, having a perfectly civil conversation over tea and crumpets, there'd be no telling what was going on in her head.

If they'd waited it out, just sat on their asses in Antigua, she would've come back. Probably would've killed them. Which, yeah, obviously, would've sucked, but…

There weren't too many people Jensen would die for. His sister and niece, obviously, and if the bullets started flying, who the hell knew, maybe Cougar, too It wasn't something he was going out of his way to test out, but the way things were going, Jensen wouldn't be that surprised if it happened.

He had no idea if Cougar kept a similar list under that hat of his, he'd never asked. But if he did, though, Jensen was sure that his family would've been on it.

 _Damn it, why couldn't that bitch have left the kid?_

The worst part, though? As fucked up as he himself felt, he knew Cougar was feeling worse. Jensen hadn't pulled any triggers, but if he hadn't told him to lead Aisha on a wild goose chase, she wouldn't have had to get so fucking creative. Things would probably be looking a whole lot different.

\---

Stegler hadn't called him in, but Jensen went over to the office anyway, found him asleep on a stack of files at the table in the middle of the office.

"Hey, look. I don't know if it means anything, but. You remember Carlos Alvarez?"

Wearing an expression on his face something had died in his mouth, Stegler stretched. "Yeah, he was on your team, right?"

Jensen nodded, feeling a little shitty. He could see Stegler's confusion, but bringing up Cougar meant bringing up a whole lot of things Stegler didn't need to get caught up in. It would probably have to happen at some point- and yeah, that was gonna be a hoot- but not yet.

"His family, down in Juarez, they were all murdered. I contacted my sister and sent her and her kid into hiding, and I'm going to see what I can do about finding Pooch again, warning him, but he went deep. I don't want to drag wolves to his door, you know?"

"You think it's connected?"

Shrugging, Jensen tried on another hundred justifications for not telling Stegler. "I don't know. I mean. If she was going to come after the families of everyone who was on the team, then, yeah. Cougar's would've been the easiest to find. I don't think there's anything more to it than that, 'cause by the time she came along, he'd cut most of those ties, like the rest of us, but."

Rubbing a hand over his tired face, dragging at the skin, Stegler stared at the table, giving it some thought. "She left that ear at _your_ door in Antigua. If she can't find yours, she'd go for your friends. If she can't find your friends, she might. I don't know. It's a stretch. You sure it was her?"

"The timing's interesting. Just happened the other day."

"How'd you hear about it?"

"I was looking them up," Jensen explained. "I mean, Cougar was a friend, and. Towards the end, there, he was talking about them. Wanted me to check up, make sure they were okay. I've. Ah. Been a little remiss in that department, I guess."

Jensen was a crappy actor, it wasn't a state secret, but between that and the fact that the lie was so plausible, under the circumstances, Stegler bought it. Besides. Now that he thought about it, it was probably something he should've taken care of a long time ago.

And, just in case he didn't feel shitty enough already, Jensen asked Stegler for a favor.

There were several good reasons for having Stegler be the one to track down Pooch. The burner line was only safe if it didn't get used too much. Stegler wouldn't be as likely to totally over-share. Pooch had made it out, he was still out there, still sane. Jensen had tried, with his own family, but Pooch had actually _managed_ it. But he'd come running, if Jensen asked. It wasn't right, going in and fucking it all up.

And besides, he'd already given Cougar the worst news left in the world to _give_. Being the one to blow off the last good friend the guy had, on top of _that_?

No fucking thanks.

\---

There was no telling how the woman had died, and nothing but the shoes that identified her as being a woman in the first place. She'd been there, curled around the base of a tree, for a long while. Years, for all Cougar knew, but not as long as the skull he'd found half a mile back.

Aokigahara was the suicide forest at the base of Mount Fuji, and it was as good a place to mourn as any. He'd passed the signs on his way in, heard the tourists talking about them. Something about convincing people that they had a lot to live for, telling them not to kill themselves. Apparently the government had placed them in hopes that adequate signage could fend off death.

They didn't seem to be working.

There were hundreds of bodies scattered throughout the trees, their deaths lonelier and more useless than his own had been. Cougar spread himself thin, there, when he'd first arrived, and had learned where all the bodies were hiding among the leaves and branches.

He hadn't lasted long, though, it was all too much. He pulled himself back in until he was just a ghost wandering through the trees. He was the only one there, all through the night.

These others, they hadn't gotten a reprieve, nothing had saved them at the last minute. But he didn't know if they would've wanted one, anyway.

 _Estulto. You know nothing of these people._

 _You knew nothing of your own family, either._

 _You should have talked to Hector. Could've shown yourself, at least_.

It wouldn't have made it worth it, but he'd had a shot, hadn't taken it it.

He was deep into the woods, now, he'd been walking for hours, now, more than a day. Across the clearing, a man's body still hung from a tree, his face so weathered and rotten that there were no features left. One moment, it was a stranger, the next, Hector. When he blinked again, it turned into Jensen, and Cougar's hand went to his phone.

There was no signal, here, anyway.

Jensen was fine. He needed to talk to him, apologize, maybe, but this, here, right now? Imagination, not omens.

Coming here had been a terrible idea, it was just making him more numb, depressed, and pissed off.

 _Mierda_ , it was awful, here.

On his way back towards the edge of the trees, he pulled himself together a little bit more, made himself solid to gain speed. Praying was easier this way, anyhow, being able to mouth the words, quiet as they were.

If Aisha would've caught up, right then, he wouldn't have honestly cared. Might have even welcomed it. In his head, he could hear the gunshot. Imagined not evading the bullet.

Making his way out of the woods, he took note of the bodies he found. Found a map at the park office and marked it with the locations of their remains.

He had no idea if anyone would notice, or if they would come looking, but right now, on the other side of the planet, there were bodies being lowered into the ground, probably by strangers. He couldn't do right by his own family, but he could do right by someone else's.

Leaving the forest, Cougar didn't stop walking until he reached the ocean, and thought about walking in. The waves crashing against the rocky shore were fierce, wild, but beyond that was just water. Uncaring, calm and forever moving.

Not moving fast enough, though. In four days, he needed to be in Chicago. In five, he'd be meeting up with Jensen. By the sixth, he decided, he'd be asking Aisha why she'd done it, and by the seventh, he'd start killing her.

He'd finish on the eighth.

\---


	8. Chapter 8

It was a shower and a panic attack and three cups of coffee later that Jensen bullshitted himself up enough to go back for another round of uselessness and dead ends.

He wasn't ready to walk into the office to find Stegler grinning. "Think I might be on the right track, finally."

"Yeah?" Jensen sat down and booted up his laptop, but Stegler was shoving a file folder across the table.

"Got some emails between project management and finance," Stegler said. "They've pushed something through under the table with the DOD, which I was able to confirm with some friends in DC." Jensen flipped through the folder, nothing but drafts of appropriations bills and memos. "Go to the back," Stegler said, fingering a post-it note stuck to one of the pages.

It was a message from an administrative assistant, writing to her boss and asking how he wanted a bunch of data sets sorted for the programmers at the St. Paul office. A little back and forth, and the terminology was spelled out. Down towards the end was a finalized list, the header above it reading "Naming Conventions."

"Holy crap," Jensen grinned, " _Fuck_ , man, why didn't I see it?" In another window, he opened the original spreadsheet and looked again. "Yeah, eleven columns here. Each cell is one part of the cataloguing number." Stegler watched over his shoulder as he plugged in the column headings.

"Like a library catalog?"

"Same principle, but they've got their own code." Jensen scrolled down the list. "Okay. Yeah. I'm seeing a bunch of repetition, here, so it looks like these," he highlighted a chunk of the list," are in the same area."

"Awesome."

Jensen shook his head. "Not so much. See, we don't have access to whatever this refers to. It's just the catalog. The library itself isn't in here, or we would've seen it sooner."

"Any idea where it is?"

"I'm guessing Minnesota," Jensen confirmed, going back to the email chain. "The St. Paul office."

Stegler's expression lost its enthusiasm, then, but he shrugged. "Can you get in?"

Jensen just grinned.

\---

It took an hour and a half to break in. Another half hour to figure out their server array, and another ten minutes to find the one he was looking for.

It took ten minutes, opening files at random, to become very, _very_ worried.

One folder seemed mostly to be contracts and master agreements. First on the list was one between Goliath, the FDA, and the Department of Defense. The next was filled with copies of agreements between university chemistry and physics departments and the Department of Education. There was a memo with the signatures of everyone on the appropriations committee, with three members having mild reservations regarding disbursal of the funds across the colleges. Another memo wondered why Goliath wanted it's name kept out of it, and a reply from Goliath's legal counsel stating that any undue attention from forced outside of the United States could result in tensing relations between the US and any number of other countries.

The next folder had more from the FDA, and it was all worryingly vague. Blank forms and samples of regulatory documentation required for Phase I experimentation on human subjects, nothing more.

The more notable items in the next folder included NOAA tables, census data, power grid information from over seventy plants throughout the US and nine from a Goliath subsidiary in India. Tectonic maps and airstream data. All sorts of weird shit.

Jensen's eyes were starting to blur. He hated this kind of work, just trawling through file after file hoping that something would jump out at him.

Still, though, he wasn't ready when he realized the last few subfolders were the collective jackpot. Research results, memos, reports- all the possible documentation one could have on a given research project. There were probably thousands of pages of experimental data, but without abstracts, the physics and chemistry of it all meant little to him, but a lot of it seemed to be about additives being mixed in with the plutonium somehow.

It meant a little more, though, when he came across some comparative radiation exposure data points.

It meant a _hell_ of a lot more a while later, when, buried in the email chain attached to a meeting memo, in a list of names that meant nothing until he reached the bottom of it, he picked out the names C. Alvarez, L. Porteous, F. Clay and A. al-Fadhil. Scanning back up again at the header, the subject read: "Presumed dead after explosion of test unit 4AF-835-2."

Jensen wasn't the type who liked to see his name in print. He _really_ wasn't the type who liked seeing it here, but he read on. And then he found it.

Six and a half months ago, Robert Stratenfield, who worked operational security, emailed the director of research, with the subject heading "What should we do about this?" No text, just an attachment, a video. Jensen downloaded it and leaned forward to watch. Security footage, hard to see, all fuzzy grays and blacks, more shadow than anything. And then he saw it.

Cougar, walking around naked, for some reason, pulling things off the shelves. It wasn't until he disappeared again, out of the cameras range with a handful of MREs that Jensen suddenly _got_ it. The footage, here, what he was seeing, was the ship Cougar had found before he'd made it back to shore.

Jensen knew he was panicking, he did, but he read onwards, now, faster than before, his eyes clear and his mind focused. A few messages down, past the month long debate regarding the video's authenticity, Stratenfield received a response to his original question.

" _It's been decided that we're going to bring in a specialist to deal with Alvarez, I've already got someone in mind, and forwarded the video. Those of you who will be involved with the specialist, I'll talk to in person, but for now, I'm ordering you not to interfere._ "

\---

The flight was long, confined, and between the never-ending hiss of re-circulated air, the random coughs and conversations of passengers who couldn't see him, and the noise of the engines, he thought he might go mad.

Below, though, out the windows, there was nothing but water, stretching out forever. Darker than it looked up close, and after hours on this plane, Cougar began to realize that he was homesick for a lot of things.

His mothers house in Carrizo Springs. The beach in Mazatlan, with all the careless vacationers. Hector's back yard, the weekend after the wedding. Jensen's unending stream of hotel rooms, all the stupid words he used that said nothing of plans, intel, or anything at all. But the months he'd spent riding the ocean's currents were the most peaceful he'd ever known. And compared to the rest of them, it wasn't that far out of reach.

For two hours, he contemplated it, and wondered if he had enough time. There was still the better part of three days before he had to be in Chicago. He made himself wait, though, until the pilot said that they're beginning their descent into Los Angeles, and then he let himself fall.

Through the floor, the sky, and towards the ocean. Pulling himself together enough that his mass could gain speed. He still had a long way to fall, after all, so he still had the time to notice it.

There was a storm coming in from the south, and Cougar watched it with disinterest until he realized that it was moving, very quickly, in his direction, but by that point, he was only a few hundred feet above the surface.

He cast himself out more widely, then, buffering his fall, and felt the crash of every one of his molecules hitting the surface, and it was only then that he realized that he hadn't been ready to land, not at all. The water was roiling, rough and crashing, ahead of the storm, and it pulled him in a thousand directions all at once.

It _tore_ at him, ripping him apart faster than he could pull himself together.

\---

Six months before Jensen had a clue, Goliath had known Cougar was alive. And they'd been planning on dealing with him ever since.

They were so, _so fucked_.

When Jensen looked up from the screen that he hadn't actually been seeing for ten minutes or more, Stegler was watching him think. It was kind disconcerting, to be honest.

"So what the hell do you have, Jensen?"

"I. Don't even know. On the surface, it looks like Goliath's setting up a bunch of schools with a lot of money to work on something big, which may or may not include meteorology, nukes, and human testing. I don't get it, though. I mean, why go through the universities when they have their own labs and massive budgets?"

"Time constraints, maybe? Spread the load?" Stegler shrugged, then a worried look crossed his face. "Shit." He paused a moment, giving it some thought. "Or, they could already suspect that the research is going to be suspect, and it's a better idea to spread that around, as far from themselves as possible."

"A cover up? This big?"

"Goliath seem like the type of company to mess with small-scale?"

Jensen quirked his lip, but didn't laugh, because Stegler already looked like he was about to have an aneurysm already, but fuck it, Goliath already knew, the Cougar was already out of the bag.

"It gets better," he said, sliding his laptop across the table. "Play that file." He watched Stegler for a while, saw the point at which he recognized Cougar.

"The _hell_? Is that _Alvarez_?"

"Fucking _looks_ like him," Jensen said, sounding deliberately shocked and maybe a little angry. "But the video's time stamped. Several months after he _died_ , man. I don't get it."

"A ghost?"

"You believe in ghosts?"

"Spooks are close enough, don't you think. Were you actually _there_ when the bomb went off?"

"No, me and Pooch cleared the scene."

"And so too, did al-Fadhil. You think they're working together?"

"I don't know," Jensen said, straight-faced, but if he was going to play dumb, here, he had to go all the way. Because _yeah_ , Goliath already knew about Cougar, but loose lips shanked shits.

"Okay. This is insane." Stegler pushed himself away from his desk. "I'm going to head down to the pub, get something to eat, try to unravel my brain a bit. You interested?"

"You kidding me?" Jensen scratched at his chest and grinned. "This is the most fun I've had all week." Roque would've glared, and Clay would've grimaced, shrugging. Pooch, though, his complaints would've turned into laughs soon enough. Cougar would've smirked, maybe shaken his head a little. But Stegler? He didn't smile, didn't even blink. It was a little disappointing.

\---

As soon as Stegler was gone, Jensen let the smile drop from his face got back to work, determined, now.

He couldn't find anything more about a specialist, and as much as he thought it might be referring to Aisha, the timing was off. The woman was smart, yeah, but not patient. She wouldn't have waited six months to come after Cougar.

As far as Jensen could tell, that left Borodin, though there was no direct reference to any names anywhere. The more he thought about it, though, the more it made sense. Aisha was one hell of a weapon, but she wasn't the sort most people could afford to be connected to, even on the thinnest of trails.

Eventually, Jensen sighed, glaring at the screen when it could tell him no more, before getting up to pace the office.

Outside, London was carrying on like it did every day, and if anybody in the street below noticed him, they didn't care. They were too busy wrangling their kids, or heading out towards the tube. Home or to the shops, arguing about football.

They had no idea what he knew. No idea that the ball was rolling down the hill, now. That one of the world's largest military contractors had edged its way into every major college and university in the states, and why would they? It was an ocean away.

Probably wouldn't stay that way for long, though. Goliath already had offices here in London, it was less than a mile away. Their pilot program would expand soon enough, hitting the continent as well, probably. Or, hell, maybe just the results _of_ that research.

And Jensen was standing above them all, watching from his window, and the knowledge was making him feel like some sort of willful co-conspirator.

Hands in his pockets, he could feel the silencer button on the burner phone with his fingertips, and was pulling it out to call Cougar when he thought better of it.

Jensen was a genius, yeah, but Goliath had known a hell of a lot more than Jensen did for a while, there. And maybe they still did. For all he knew, that cat down there on the corner, climbing into a taxi, was Borodin himself. And if anyone on the planet could afford the massive amount of time, money, and _patience_ it would take to track down calls between two burners, it was Goliath.

He just didn't fucking _know_.

\---

The storm passed long before Cougar was able to pull the last shreds of himself back in, and he moved towards the shore as quickly as he could manage.

He couldn't manage much. The water was still rough, and progress was slow, too slow. His entire being felt weak, tired, and he wondered if he hadn't left part of himself out in the water behind him.

There was no point in going back to look, though.

The sun had gone down by the time the water pushed him to shore, and once he arrived, he made his hands and grabbed at the sand, holding on, bracing for the next wave. When it came, though, it washed over him entirely.

But it didn't move him. He had to open his eyes to realize that he'd become visible, and had to close them again as his body registered new complaints. The fatigue was sharper, now, pressing him into the sand, and with every muscle in his body feeling so strained, it took more effort than it should've to roll himself over.

 _Estoy chingado,_ he decided, because it was easier to do this if there weren't any false hopes getting in the way.

Slowly, carefully, Cougar began to take inventory. Limbs first, fingers, toes, they were all there, and as far as he could tell, all his major organs remained where they should've been. Nothing was bleeding, nothing was broken.

But he was _exhausted_ , though.

Looking up the beach, he saw the boardwalks, and realized that the ocean had spit him up on what was probably Venice beach. It was as good a place as any to take a nap.

It wasn't like he had a home to get to, after all.

\---

" _Nobody_ puts baby in a corner," Jensen knew his grin was a little off-putting when Stegler stopped short, _The Times_ in his hand.

"What are you talking about?" he asked, and it was funny, the way he forgot sometimes that Stegler wasn't Clay, Pooch or any of the others. That he had _no_ idea how awesome Jensen could be when he was bored _and_ pissed off.

"I have a plan, made of one hundred percent pure brilliant idiocy. I suggest we enact it post-haste."

"You just said-" Stegler shook his head. "What are you talking about?"

"We're sitting on enough info, here, to completely fuck up Goliath's game plan." Jensen toyed with the thumb drive that he'd filled once he'd finished the upload. All the pictures of his family, a few songs he'd found online, and copies of the most damning files he'd been able to fit on there. If he went through with this, he could have the information out and the computer clean within minutes, now.

"We don't even know what their game plan _is_."

"Dollars to donuts it doesn't include their entire server being copied to the internet, though."

Stegler stared, his face filling with dread. "You _can't_ be serious."

"As a general rule, I try not to be, but I've been known to make exceptions." Jensen sighed. "But yeah, seriously. It's one hell of a jack move, and my ass isn't the only one I've got on the line, here, which is why it's uploaded and ready to go, but hasn't actually _gone_ yet. Wanted to run it by you first."

"And that wasn't enough to tell you how _bad_ your plan is?"

They were getting off on the wrong foot, here.

"Look. It's been weeks, now, and you're no closer to setting up our inside man, and who knows how long it'll take to bear fruit. We still don't know who Borodin is, and we still have no idea why the hell Aisha killed Marsden. Way I see it, we can sit here on our asses and wait around for a few more months, or we can see how the cockroaches scatter when the lights come on."

Stegler sat down in his chair, leaning back with a scowl on his face, but he said nothing, and Jensen didn't push it.

"I don't like it," Stegler said. "It's reckless as hell, and it's going to be _huge_. They're not going to be cockroaches, Jake. Their retaliation is going to be _massive_."

"Well, they're not going to be able to come back to us. I covered the hell out of my trail, man. This ain't my first rodeo," Jensen replied, smirking.

Stegler snorted, shaking his head, and stared off into the middle distance. After a few minutes, he rocked his head back in Jensen's direction.

"Fuck it. I can't move on with any of my prospects anyway, not until Borodin's identified. You really think you'll be able to shake him out?"

"If anything can, this will. Aisha too, if we're lucky." Jensen stopped talking then, even though he knew Stegler was already on side. He'd pushed it a bit to far with him anyway, and fuck, it wasn't like Jensen was running high on allies, these days.

"Fuck it. What the hell. One thing, though. You don't do it from here."

"Wasn't planning on it," Jensen shook his head. "I'm heading down to-"

" _Don't_ tell me," Stegler said. "I really don't want to know."

\---

The timer was on the files, they'd go public in three hours from a server in Shanghai, and Jensen wiped his hard drive.

The computer was gutted and scattered all over the East End within four hours. By the end of the fifth, he was standing on a street near the Chelsea Embankment, thumbing his burner open to share the news.

And then he remembered.

Goliath was going to come back _hard_.

It would make the news. Front page for a month at least. Cougar wouldn't be able to miss it if he _tried_. In three days, Jensen would be screwing with a flight out of Chicago, and another day or so after that, he could explain it all to his face.

He'd risked enough, today, too fucking much, and he really didn't need to be painting a target on Cougar's back, or his own.

The sim card went out into the water, the phone itself into a bin seven blocks away.

On his way back to the hotel, he used his regular cell to call Stegler, tell him it was all sorted, and that he was going to get out of London, soon, just to be on the safe side.

"Good idea. I'm heading out of the office now, getting a flight out when I get to my hotel. Be in touch, and good luck, yeah?"

"Sure thing. You too." Jensen said, and ended the call. Heading up the street, he noticed an Apple store and checked his watch as he crossed towards it. They'd be closing in ten minutes, but fuck it, he had more than enough cash on him to make it worth it.

\---

Setting up the new computer, stripping it of everything he didn't need, kept him a little bit more sane, helped him keep his eye off the clock. He checked the departure times and found that his flight was still on schedule to leave in eleven hours, but refrained from checking up on the O'Hare timetables. He still had three days, yet.

He couldn't call Cougar if he wanted to, which he did, badly, but he didn't check on his sister, either. It wasn't a skill. Jake Jensen had paranoia honed down to an _art_.

Putting their pictures up on this computer was stupid enough, but he was going to do it anyway. He reached into his pocket for his thumb drive, but it wasn't there. It wasn't in his other pockets, either, or his coat, and then he could see it, in his head, sitting on the table back at the office.

If Cougar were there, his glare would probably read, _that was careless, and you're a crappy artist_. The fact that Jensen was seeing it anyway was probably a sign that he needed to get some sleep.

\---

 _Screw it. It's not like sleep's good for you, anyway_ , he decided, letting himself into the office building. _At least you still have the keys_.

He climbed the stairs to the third floor and let himself out into the hallway, passing the internet startup, the law firm, and the two bathrooms the offices shared on his way towards the end, and he was very nearly to Stegler's door when he realized four things. The door was open. The lights were on. Someone was moving around inside, and Stegler had gone home hours ago.

 _Unless he's lying dead on the floor_ , his brain supplied.

Easing himself against the wall, he looked across the hallway. The shared bathroom was his best bet for hiding, and if he needed to fight, there was probably something useful up in the ceiling tiles, if Stegler was Stegler.

 _Man, I hope you're not dead._..

But all his hopes and fears with regards to Stegler were confirmed the moment he stepped inside.  
The bathroom was clean- as clean as it ever got, really, but the ceiling tile above the toilet was sitting slightly askew. Upon closer inspection, it was also empty.

Which meant he'd gone for it, earlier.

 _Damn it!_

Jensen searched through the cabinet under the sink, found a can of aerosol air freshener. It wasn't a gun, but it would sting like hell, long as he got it in their eyes. Also, they would smell nice, and Jensen was down for all the small mercies he could get.

Listening first to make sure the hallway was clear, he eased the door open again, slowly, and stepped across, freezing when he heard the voice coming from inside, then nearly laughing out loud when he realized it was Stegler.

And then nearly crying, when he realized what he was saying.

"-got _everything_ out there, and it's spreading like wildfire… I don't think we _can_ contain it at this point. No, I have no idea how he did it, and that he's in the wind already… No, I called Stratenfield already, and as far as he and his care, you and me, we're in the clear from _that_ side, at least."

 _Motherfucker_ , Jensen thought, adding in an extra _fuck_ for good measure. He'd been played, _so_ damned bad.

"Look, what I'm saying is that it's out, who the fuck knows how far it's going to blow. If Jensen doesn't figure it out, someone else will. I'm killing off the Borodin alias as of now, just to be on the safe side, and frankly, _Aisha_ my dear, it might be time for you to try one on….Yeah. Okay. Uh-huh, well, I'm almost out of here. Gone by first light. _No._ I'll talk to you once I get Stateside. Just lay low. A few days, tops. Okay, bye."

\---

Jensen hadn't realized he was frozen to the spot, but he was back in the bathroom, air freshener at the ready, for three minutes before he heard the office door shut.

He waited another five before peeking his head out the door. The hallway was clear.

Hurrying into the office, he found it mostly gutted. The equipment was still there, but all the boxes of files were gone, and the computers had probably been wiped. Or not, maybe, but in light of things, it _really_ didn't matter.

He rummaged through the scattered empty folders on the desk, searching for the drive, becoming more and more confident that Stegler'd pocketed it, but then he found it underneath the chair.

It wasn't much of a relief, though. Not fucking at all.

\---

Uneasy on the streets, Jensen hurried back to his hotel. It was too late to find another room, but as far as he could tell, nobody had been in while he'd been on his errand. Nothing was out of place. If bugs had been planted, Jensen wasn't able to find them.

Which meant the room was probably clean. Which meant that either they weren't coming, or they just hadn't come _yet_. Long as he stayed awake, he could hit the airport first thing in the morning, and at least wait to be killed in _public_.

Which meant that at the moment, it was probably time to fill Cougar in on everything while he still had the chance. Jensen sat on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out where to start, what to say and what not to, as he rummaged around his pockets looking for the burner.

 _Damn it._

He'd thrown it into the river already. Even if he called from a different phone, Cougar wouldn't pick up. He'd cut him off to spite his face. _Real nice_. And fuck it, after that last call, there was no telling if he'd pick up, anyway.

Jensen's knuckles stung, and they were a bit bloody when he looked down at his hand. He'd probably cut it on the edge of one of the file boxes back at the office.

He'd never gotten around to finding out of Cougar could use his abilities to heal himself. Right then, it was the kind of thing he would've liked to know for sure.

 _Yeah, cause a guy who can walk through walls needs to worry about paper cuts._

Still, it was a thought experiment, trying to figure out how it all worked. The exact sort of thing nights like this were _made_ for, trying to take the known data and push it into something useable. Like his capability to bring things with him, or how thinly he could spread himself out, or at what point, exactly, he became more visible than invisible.

If he was just waiting here for Stegler or Aisha to burst in, guns blazing, he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of having their traitorous bullshit anywhere _near_ his mind when it happened.

And if his brain kept turning to Cougar, well, it hurt a hell of a lot less, keeping to the academics.

\---

By the time the sun rose, Jensen was a mess, exhausted, but he could sleep over the Atlantic soon enough. He took a quick shower, glared at himself one last time in the mirror, and headed out to the airport.

Standing in line to pick up his tickets for New York City, his eyes wandered towards the arrival and departure screens. Soon enough, he'd have O'Hare's computers hacked, and he'd be waiting for Cougar to arrive. He toyed, for a few minutes, with the idea of Minnesota, of getting a jump-start on hitting Goliath's offices there, but they'd be going in blind. Better to get organized as far away from the fire as possible.

 _Miami, maybe?_

"Jensen!"

 _No. Fuck no_. Without turning around, his eyes scanned the area, the ticket desk, the security queues, but he knew, already, that all the best exits were behind him.

" _Jensen_!" Stegler's voice called again, sounding surprised, happy even. Nothing like he'd sounded last night, when he'd announced himself as the traitor he was.

Jensen kept his eyes on the line in front of him. There were three people ahead of him, a tired looking couple and a very stressed suit. He wouldn't make it to the counter before Stegler caught up with him, and already, others were turning to search out the source of the commotion.

 _Relax_ , he told himself, turning around. _You saw him, he never saw you. Play it cool._ Stegler was carrying his jacket, and it looked like he'd sweat through his shirt already.

"Hey, man, what's up?"

"Can I talk to you a minute?" he asked, nodding back towards the doors. There were enough people milling that Stegler couldn't pull shit if he tried.

"I'm going to be late for my flight," Jensen lied, but Stegler shook his head, shrugging.

"Then get on the next one. This is _important_."

Jensen did not want to move. He did anyway, following Stegler out the doors and back outside.  
"What do you got?" he asked, as soon as they'd stepped away from the doors. At least if anything hinky went down out here, he could make a decent run for it.

Stegler leaned close, glancing back over Jensen's shoulder nervously. It was confirmation enough that he had no clue Jensen was onto him. "That shit you pulled with Goliath's blowing up all over the place, you seen the news?"

"No, I've been sleeping," he lied. "What's up?"

"I managed to get into Stratenfield's files. He's going to be here, in London. Tomorrow," Stegler smirked. "Meeting with a bunch of execs and a few MPs. If we you get ears in that room-"

"I can't," Jensen raised his palms, shrugging, taking a step back.

"But we're so close!" Stegler complained, following him like some over-aged puppy, and Jensen rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, but we'll _still_ be this close next week," he said. "And I need a few days _off_ from all this, man. I'm _tired_."

"I can't promise we can wait for you," Stegler said, straightening his spine and regarding Jensen curiously.

"I know," Jensen said, before his brain could catch up to the word " _we_."

"No. Really." Easing his shoulder back, Stegler glanced down at himself, at the coat he was carrying. The nozzle of a handgun was just barely sticking out, and it was aimed at Jensen's chest. "I don't think we can wait. Now come along, Jake. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it's still on the list."

\---


	9. Chapter 9

Cougar had felt a little better after sleeping on the beach for seven stupidly careless hours, but far from rested.

Another twelve hours crashed out in a stolen hotel room hadn't helped as much as he'd hoped, either, and it was making him uneasy. As much as he would've liked to tell himself he was coming down with something- a cold, even the flu- he wasn't an idiot. Something was missing. A few cells, maybe, or a hair-thin layer of muscle, somewhere.

He supposed he should've felt lucky his brain was still intact, that it hadn't been worse, but he knew how luck worked, and mostly just wondered how much time he had before it turned into something worse.

It wasn't the sort of thing he'd want to talk about on the best of days, but staring at himself in the mirror, examining himself for lesions and fingers arms that looked too thin, he was maybe ready to admit that it would've been nice, having the option to _tell_ someone he didn't want to fucking talk about it.

Of course, that pretty much meant Jensen, who he'd be seeing in two days, who couldn't do anything about it, and who'd probably just tell him more bad news the moment he got on the line.

Still, though, this entire line of thinking is enough to push him out the door, all the way out to the airport, and onto the next Chicago flight. If he's just going to be checking the clock every three minutes, he might as well get the traveling out of the way.

This time, once the plane is in the air and he's thinking about finding something that looks like home, he stays put.

\---

Jensen wasn't sure how long the flight lasted, being as how he was unconscious for at least a little while, and the assholes had taken his watch when they'd divested him of everything besides his clothes.

That, actually, was nearly enough to make him _like_ them, and even though they hadn't gone so far into character as to be wearing dark glasses and matching suits, they were definitely the quietly surly type. As far as kidnappings went, this one was fairly comfortable, even if his jeans felt like they were going to fall off.

He was crammed into the window seat of what felt like a very small plane, and surrounded by security, because apparently they thought he was insane enough to try hijacking a plane with no weapons or even shoes. Stegler was in the next row up, across the aisle, talking in hushed tones to the blonde woman sitting next to him.

He closed his eyes again, out of complete fucking boredom, vaguely aware of the fact that he could probably start one hell of a ruckus if he wanted to, but that only worked in the movies. _But soon_ , he promised himself. Once they were on land again, and he had an exit that didn't involve hurtling down at the earth at a thousand miles an hour, the ruckus would _ensue_.

\---

They threw a hood over his eyes as soon as the plane started to descend, in case Jensen was so good at geography he could tell what airport they were flying into based on the shapes of a few lakes and a highway grid, but the best chance to get gone is once they're transferring him into another vehicle.

Besides, this was always going to have to happen, at some point. And yeah, it would've been nice to be prepared, to not be going in- literally- with blinders on, but it's not like _that's_ something he had a lot of experience with, anyway. It's been the story of his life, more or less.

So whatever. Most of the time, his job was to break into a place and then break out again. This way, his job was already half done.

Jensen's mental pep talks were getting weirder every year.

\---

Jensen could feel the concrete changing underneath his feet, becoming smoother as they stepped inside, then quieter as they turned to cross over a swath of commercial carpeting. That the elevator they boarded next was heading downwards was no surprise, and the same went for the return of the carpeting.

He was jerked to a halt again by the tight grip on his cuffed arms, forced to wait for a moment, before being pushed across another change in the floor. Cold metal, then, that echoed underneath their footsteps.

The room was a lot brighter than he'd thought it would be, almost blinding after the darkness inside the hood, and it took him a few moments to make out any features at all. Three walls made of concrete brick, painted white, and the fourth, behind him, made of reinforced glass. The door itself was metal, but didn't shine with the same polished sheen as the floor.

Most surprising was the fact that there was something in the corner that looked like a toilet, or at least what a toilet would look like if designed by Apple. Already, from where Jensen stood, it looked depressingly seamless. Anything he could find in there to fashion into a tool was out of reach.

He was going to be here for a while, then.

And _that_ , right there, was where the flight response began to kick in, but it only lasted a moment before the current ran through him and he was falling to the floor.

\---

"More news, now, on the massive leak of documents describing contracts between the US DOD and Goliath, a top secret project that has a lot of critics wondering what it's all for. As you know, this story just becomes stranger and stranger. While the authorities search for the perpetrator of the leak, and Goliath officials seek to minimize the damage, thousands of people, around the world, are reading and discussing the files."

It was nearly noon on October 7th, and Cougar had been sitting in an uncomfortable terminal chair for nearly three hours.

On the television screen next to the airport monitors, the hourly news cycle was starting again, only this time, he was paying attention.

"It's becoming apparent that part of this research, at least, includes the creation of containment units, what some sources are calling molecular-level prisons. No word, as of yet, why the DOD is interested in this kind of technology this, or how, exactly, this relates to Goliath's massive investment into higher education, but we will be bringing you this afternoon's press conference at the Goliath Office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with reports and updates throughout the day, here, on CNN."

As soon as they cut to a commercial, Cougar began trying to sort out what he knew.

One, this had Jensen's fingerprints all over it. Two, he probably wasn't the only one who knew it.

A woman's prerecorded voice came over the terminal's PA system to announce that the local time was twelve noon, and Cougar locked his eyes on the departures screen.

Three, Goliath had tapped Aisha to come after him, and somehow, it was all tied up with the current headlines, but already some of the details of what he'd heard were fading in the mix. He already knew she wanted him dead. Knowing _why_ was purely academic.

Besides, points four and five were much more troubling.

If Jensen couldn't get to his phone, it was easy enough to assume he's try to get a message out some other way, confusing as it was.

It was twelve thirty, now, no delays had been announced, and Jensen wasn't answering his phone.

Something was very, very wrong.

\---

Cougar considered his options.

It didn't take long. He didn't have all that many.

Whatever the hell was going on, the only location he had a lock on was St. Paul, and the next flight out there was boarding in five minutes. He could work out a plan en route.

\---

Stegler was standing over him when he came to, and Jensen was so intent on trying to kick him in the head that it took him a few moments to notice the three guns aimed at his head.

Stegler smirked. "You done? Because frankly, waiting for you to wake up again after having your head smashed in is just a waste of time for all of us."

"Yeah." Jensen said, slowly backing himself up against the wall, as unthreateningly as possible, with was, at the moment, easier than he would've liked it to be. It did, however, give him an opportunity to scan the gunmen again. Their guns, the nifty suits they wore. "So, what's going on? CIA's upped their dress codes, now?"

One of the gunmen, standing next to Stegler, smirked disconcertingly with a sidelong glance at Stegler.

"They're not agents," Stegler smirked. "The Agency has me out on loan, in order to protect the nation's best interests. And at the moment, we're quite interested in _you_ , and I assume you already know why."

Jensen grinned, nervously, and hoped he could pass it off as charm. "So. About that entire hacking Goliath thing. The bad news is that it can't be undone, even with all my genius at my disposal, and we all know it. The good news is that I'm sorry."

"We're already aware of that, as well as your tendency to spout massive amounts of bullshit under duress," the smirking gunman cut in.

"And every other waking fucking moment," Stegler agreed. Apparently that gunman, at least, wasn't such a drone that he was supposed to keep his mouth shut. "But you've got to know, by now, that _you're_ not why we're here."

"Then why?"

"Carlos Alvarez."

"He's dead."

"We both know that's not true."

"Can't blame me for trying," Jensen shrugged, frowning before looking up at Stegler again to ask the useless question that he'd been dreading ever since the taser, or whatever it had been, hit him. "Don't suppose you'd believe me that I have no idea where he is?"

"Actually, I would. It's been sticking in my craw for weeks, now. Thankfully, you already solved that problem for us."

"Huh?"

"Don't think he's seen the news," the head gunman pointed out.

"Oh, that's right." Turning to Jensen, he explained. "Well. No matter. I'm sure Alvarez has. He's probably already on his way. Your ridiculous little stunt, and don't think you're sliding on that, I mean, you _did_ just piss off the most powerful military contractor in the history of all _mankind_ , but at least there's a silver lining. You're leading him right to us."

"Why the hell would he come out because of a bunch of leaked files that he knows nothing about?"

"Because _you're_ the one who put them out there. And you happen to be the only person left in the world that Alvarez could call a friend."

Jensen scoffed, pretending not to notice the gun on the right shifting slightly. "Yeah, you made sure of that, didn't you? Real nice, going after his family like that."

Stegler shrugged. "A soldier that can't be killed is worth killing for. Your congressman probably agrees."

\---

As soon as they were gone, Jensen let go a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.

 _Fuck_.

He curled in on himself, bringing his knees to his chest, and managed to get his feet on the other side of his cuffed wrists, which was a little more comfortable. Not that there was much to do with his hands, here, but if something arose, at least he'd be ready.

 _Fucking Stegler, man_.

If what he said during his Bond villain speech was right, then Cougar was on his way here already, wherever here was. There were a lot of offices mentioned in the files he'd leaked. A lot of labs, too. But maybe the news reports were going off in a direction he didn't know, and it wasn't as if Goliath was incapable of directing the story any which way they wanted to.

It was long past the point where he should've been hacking into O'Hare, setting up their rendezvous point, but Cougar would've figured out that something was wrong by now. He'd know that Jensen was screwed, and that a trap was being set.

He also knew that it probably wouldn't stop him coming, and it was ridiculous, being so undecided about that.

On the one hand, whatever they had in store for Cougar couldn't be good. On the other, Jensen hadn't seen him in weeks. And yeah, he would've much preferred to meet him out for a beer, somewhere, but.

Hell, if they hadn't caught him yet, it meant he was still alive. It was actually a comfort. Not much of one, granted- it was hard to hang on to any sort of optimism when locked down and sitting on your ass- but it was there, nonetheless.

\---

Jensen's muscles were sore after the first hour or so, so he stood up and began to pace, surveying his new domain and learning absolutely nothing new. The walls went all the way up to the ceiling, the floor went all the way out to the walls. The darkened hallway outside the window was mostly empty but for another door across the hall that opens once as a woman in a lab coat steps out, heading down the hall with barely a glance in his direction.

His feet were still tingling, a little bit, from the earlier shock, and it's kind of disgusting to think anyone would _build_ a room like this.

Eventually, he was bored out of his mind, impatient, and hungry. He pounded on the glass, trying to attract attention from an empty corridor, but no response came.

There was a flickering in the lights, though, a few moments later, and a slight buzz in the air that was probably the fluorescent bulbs up above.

Eventually, he began to feel heavy. Nothing worrying-well, nothing _drastic_ , but he found himself easing himself back down to lie on the floor, because it was all catching up to him, and gravity, sometimes, was too hard to resist.

\---

Besides dozing off for interminable stretches of time, there wasn't much to do, there, but lie on the floor and think about the many shitty things that were probably being planned out for him.

It was Cougar that they wanted, yeah, but it wasn't as if they'd be able to catch him, torture him. So they'd do the next best thing, they'll tell him that they can shut off the current arcing up from the floor, scouring Jensen's brains, as long as Cougar does what they want him to do.

And he probably won't do it.

 _And we're back to recreational electrocution, once again. Awesome._

Or worse, maybe he would.

He hadn't eaten in more than a day, and was too lethargic to do much more than think about all the varied ways he hated his life.

\---

Cougar was the first one off the plane, keeping himself just tightly bound enough to rush through the terminal without being seen. His first stop was the security center, through the wall into the lost and found, where he emptied every wallet he could find and pocketed the cash before dispersing himself again, and passing through the wall.

He hesitated on the outside, just for a minute, still wary of leaving any traces of himself. Once he was sure he was all there, he pulled himself together just tightly enough to gain enough speed to rush through the airport, following the arrows pointing towards the baggage claim areas and ground transportation.

Once he got down there, though, the number of signs seemed to multiply, and he had to pause for a moment to figure out where the hell he could catch a taxi. He was trying to figure out where, exactly, the sign was pointing, glancing out the windows towards the parking ramps, when a better answer revealed itself.

Aisha was over at the next carousel, hefting her suitcase and sidestepping to make room for a few college kids in matching sweatshirts.

He followed her carefully, considering. In all likelihood, yes, he was heading towards something bad. If Jensen had been compromised, maybe he'd talked. Maybe they were waiting for him.

But if they were, they wouldn't be expecting him to show up with Aisha.

\---

It was easy enough to slide through the door into the front seat as Aisha tossed her suitcase in the trunk, rattling off an address in St. Paul. The driver, a Somalian man, was chatty, but she wasn't the type to overshare with strangers, so Cougar watched her, as they wove their way through rush-hour traffic, and learned nothing.

Downtown St. Paul was a confusing mess of lights to the east, but as they pulled off of the highway, the cab went north for a short while on the surface streets, eventually pulling up in front of a business park that looked far too busy for this time of day.

"Pull around back," Aisha instructed, and Cougar could see why- most of the vehicles in the lot are media vans. Newspaper and television and radio. Following a curve around the building, he caught sight of a dais, sitting up on the front steps, framed in bright lights, but the stage was empty. Whatever had happened, here, they'd missed it.

Odds were, though, it wasn't why he'd come, anyway.

\---

He was through the door before Aisha slid her key card through, and he had to wait for her to check her bags at the security station, but finally, unencumbered by the weight, she was moving more quickly, now. Through an impressive reception area, then through a door leading into a long corridor, where she nodded at a distracted looking man coming from the other way, his car keys in his hand.

She went around a corner, then, and at the end of the hallway was another security checkpoint, where she had her retinas scanned and her thumbs printed. Cougar slid through the open door behind her.

Aisha stopped at the first bank of elevators and called one up to take her down, and finally, falling into step next to her, the scenery was starting to change. There was an open door to the right, and she ducked her head in to ask, "I heard Jake Jensen's been brought in?"

"He's in containment," one of the guards said, nodding at two others, who pushed themselves away from their desks. "We'll come with you. Protocol, and all that."

After that, the group passed laboratories on the left, then stopped at a bank of windows on the right, and all he could see was Jensen.

It was obvious that Jensen could see the guards through the glass, but his eyes were locked intently on the heavy door, wary at the sound of the door being opened, and he was starting to stand.

\---

The second guard slid sideways, covering him, and then Jensen saw her.

" _Aisha?!_ " Jensen was pretty sure he hadn't managed to get all the hatred into his tone when he spoke, so he followed his admittedly surprised expression with a glare.

"Hello, Jensen. Long time no see. How was Antigua?"

 _How was Juarez, you backstabbing bitch?_ "Lovely. What the fuck are you-"

"Doing here? My job, such as it is. Visual confirmation."

"Of what, that I'm sitting around with my thumb up my ass?"

"Actually, yes," Aisha grinned at him, nodding at the guards, who covered her as they backed through the door, and she followed them out, glancing around the room with a final smirk. "Both of you."

 _The hell?_

The moment the door was shut, the lights overhead began to buzz again, faintly, but that wasn't what held Jensen's attention.

He was too busy staring into Cougar's stunned eyes.

\---


	10. Chapter 10

"Cougs?"

 _What the hell?_

Jensen didn't allow him much time for rumination, he was already grabbing him, wrapping his arms around him fast before pulling back to glare at him. "The hell are you doing here?"

He nodded towards the door. "I followed Aisha from the airport. Underestimated how ready they'd be."

"Shit." Jensen stepped back, suddenly concerned as he examined him. "Exactly _how_ ready are we talking, here?"

Cougar shrugged. _Ready enough that you can see me._ Shaking his head, he waved Jensen away, stepped back and concentrated. Nothing happened.

"You're still here," Jensen pointed out, disappointed, but not unhelpful, as his eyes turned towards the walls and the floor, the window and the door again. He muttered to himself as he slowly paced the room. He kept coming back to the door and the window, though, examining the door's metal slot that, of course, could only be opened from the outside, and the small holes that had been drilled into the glass at about shoulder height. It didn't seem unusual to Cougar, but Jensen was shaking his head now, ruefully, and turned back to the floor again. "…makes sense, too much interference for electronic communication, but…how they got it set up…shit…okay, so Jackass McTeague was right…"

"Who's McTeague?"

"My high school guidance counselor. Said I should go into engineering." Jensen knelt in the corner, his fingers sliding along the edge of the floor. "Course, he also suggested that I become a veterinarian, and I never did figure out why he thought I'd enjoy spending my life with my hands up the assess of other people's household pets. I mean, I had a dog growing up, and loved that thing, but there's some lines you just don't cross, you know?" Jensen turned to look at him, but instead of standing again, just got more comfortable on the floor as his own thoughts distracted him.

Cougar sat down next to him, giving him a few minutes, only looking over when he heard the snort. "Okay. Spitballing here." Jensen waved a handful of twitching fingers. "You're stuck here, right?"

"Yeah."

"And I'm tired as hell, I mean, I feel like I've gained 30 pounds since I got here, and while yeah, they gave me some food, but it wasn't _that_ good. I mean. Better than that camp in Nyala, worse than that week outside Lima. Not good enough for my waistline to expand faster than the speed of light."

"You look fine," Cougar frowned, running his eyes over him again. Aside from the stubble and the frown etched deeply into the side of his mouth, he looked okay.

"Yes. But." He pulled a face. "At first I thought it was exhaustion, then I figured they'd put something in my food to knock me out, but now… Now I'm thinking it's the room itself. You hear that buzzing?" He lazily pointed towards the ceiling, where most of the low whining hum of electronics could be heard.

"Sí. They're doing something to us right now?"

Jensen shrugged. "I don't know. Radio signals, maybe, hell, artificial gravity would work. Keeps me down, keeps you here. Shit." Jensen ran a hand down his face and rested his head against the wall glancing at him out of the corner of his eye. "In case you're just tuning in, Cougs, you really shouldn't have come."

\---

Jensen did what he could to fill Cougar in. Told him everything Stegler said and tried to do it without panicking. It had been easier when he'd been alone here, where there was still a chance that he'd make it to the end of his life without being the reason Cougar went down. Again.

They didn't have all that much time, however, to contemplate. After a few moments, there were three guards and one doctor waiting on the other side of the window as the posted guard opened the door. Next to him, Cougar tensed, and Jensen followed suit, out of instinct, but he made himself relax. He'd see the drawn guns soon enough.

\---

"I hope you understand that this process is not, in and of itself, meant to harm you, only to understand. We have no wish to harm you, Alvarez," Dr. Harris said. "Though there are many who feel otherwise regarding Corporal Jensen, here."

Turning back to Cougar, Harris sighed. "And I am aware of both of your reputations, so I will tell you, flat out, that it will be a lot less painful, for both of you, if you both cooperate during this study.

"What do you need us to _do_?"

"You're our control. We need to monitor for safety." Turning his eyes to Cougar, Harris continued. "Unfortunately, some of them may induce a stress response, but we need to be certain you don't lose your focus. For one, these tests are expensive, we don't want to have to run them twice because of any brash reactions. We also expect that we'll have to, given your record, so it is to that end that Jensen here will not only be an environmental control, but an emotional one."

"You're going to kill me if he makes a break for it?"

"We hope it won't come down to that, but we are prepared to make it happen."

"Yeah, but once I'm dead, you're out a bargaining chip."

"True, but this is a phase one study. Not all our test subjects are expected to survive, and while we do try to avoid that, there is still much to be learned from a subject's post-mortem." Harris nodded to himself, and signaled the guards as the door was opened from outside. "We'll start in the morning. Please, do, try and get some rest."

As soon as they'd cleared the room, two other guards came in, carrying between them an inflated air mattress, which they set on the floor.

Jensen didn't stop giggling- _couldn't_ stop- until Cougar punched him.

\---

 _Cougar's on the table, fighting against his restraints as the doctor makes the first incision, then the second. He's breathing hard, but doesn't make a sound until they peel back the skin, but it's cut off, quick, and Jensen's own heart stops in sympathy._

 _"He's finally under," one of the masked doctors says, and the other nods, checking the monitors._

 _"At least he'll stop thrashing. Let's get on with it."_

 _And then they're through the ribcage, digging through him, taking samples and digging ever deeper. There's an awful hesitation when they reach his spine, but soon enough, they're lifting fragments of what looks like bone into a dish._

 _And then they just keep going._

 _Jensen's not sure which cut did it, which one cut the skin, but bloods running out from under Cougar's back now, pooling on the table and dripping down the side in ever-increasing volume, splashing on the doctor's shoes. One irritated snort later, they've decided to move onto his brain._

 _When one of the doctors moves to the side to reach for the saw, Jensen can see Cougar staring back at him, his eyes dead and glassy._

\---

Jensen snapped his eyes open to find Cougar staring down at him, more irritated than worried, but his eyes slipped into something like sympathy soon enough. _Bad Dreams?_

"Yeah," Jensen said, and closed his eyes again, waiting for his heartbeat to stop trying to pound through his chest.

Cougar lay down again next to him, but Jensen wasn't sure that either of them slept.

\---

In the morning, the mattress was taken away and food was brought in, but the things that were brought in afterwards kept Cougar's appetite to a minimum.

There was a gurney with locking wheels, and carts full of equipment. Only a small portion of what they were setting out looked at all medical, the rest were wires and monitors and metal boxes and clamps.

Jensen kept his eyes turned away, towards the window and the hallway outside, his food untouched.

\---

It was amazing, the amount of crap they brought in to work on them. But it gave Jensen an idea. Because if they weren't doing this in the lab, which was probably more suited to this sort of thing, it meant that they _had_ to do it in here.

Which meant the lockdown they had on Cougar didn't extend much past the walls or the window.

All Cougar would need to do to escape was make it out into the hallway. All he needed was a seven-foot head start. The only way to figure out how to get it, though, was to learn how the doctors and guards operated.

Which meant that when the time came, and the doctor, one they hadn't met before, instructed Cougar to come over, Jensen had to let him go.

\---

The restraints seemed a little redundant, but so did the gun pointed at Jensen's head, so Cougar went with it. Something was wrapped around his finger and he could suddenly hear his heartbeat over the monitor.

"This one is easy," the doctor was explaining. "All we're going to do today is establish your baselines at different levels of gravity. I assume you've heard the warnings regarding your complete cooperation?"

Cougar nodded, glanced at the window in hopes of catching Jensen's reflection in the glass, but all he saw was the back of the guard, aiming his sidearm in Jensen's direction.

He nodded.

\---

Sometimes, they could hear snatches of conversation and the sounds of chairs being scraped across the floor from the lab across the hallway. Scientists, mostly, and some of them were civilians. People who walked by this room, glanced sidelong as they hurried past, and never broke off their conversations about their meeting schedules and deadlines and time frames.

They were doing this for a goddamned _paycheck_.

Still, though, Jensen watched them all, even if they never met his eyes. Maybe, at some point, one of them would, and there'd be something there that wasn't looking back at him like he was anything more than a vaguely interesting fixture, or a germ on a slide. It never happened.

Which was still a lot better than having them all watching, rapt, as the first experiments began.

\---

The room kept him in his body, and the restraints- strange, thick things of metal and wire- kept his body on the table. At least Cougar could move his head. He could turn, if he wanted to, and look at the guards standing over Jensen, eyes unmoving. If he craned his neck enough, he could see him, sitting against the wall, his cuffed hands out of sight, hidden behind his knees.

He couldn't bring himself to look any higher, couldn't risk looking him in the eye. He didn't want to see any more.

\---

When the time came, he braced himself for the pain, but none came.

"Relax," the doctor said. "Let me know if it starts to hurt. It shouldn't, but we're trying to get a picture of the process of dispersal, understand what's happening to you at every step in the disembodiment process. This is nothing you haven't done before. This time, however, we will be the ones controlling it." Glancing up at the other doctors, he turned his head towards the window and raised his right hand.

Cougar didn't feel a thing, not for a while, but eventually, he began to feel looser, like he was sinking through the table.

"Okay, we're losing visual now," someone said, and he kept going, slowly. The monitor lost his heartbeat, but there were other readings coming off other monitors that didn't seem to be surprising any of the doctors, and he could see their faces now, behind their masks, he was beginning to wind himself through and around the equipment on the table. He could stretch himself out towards the door.

But only to a point. He was less than a foot away when the resistance was too much to fight.

He was washed out all over the room, behind the doctors and in the space between Jensen's lower back and the wall, and he stretched himself down, now, trying to work one of the centimeter-wide gaps between the floor and the wall.

He felt himself come up against something that burned, then, and his entire being flinched away.

It was getting harder to stay like this. He felt himself drifting back towards the table, pulled against his will bit by bit until he could feel the restraints around his arms and legs again. Until the only sight he had was coming through his eyes. So he noticed when the doctors were able to see him again, even before they called out visual contact.

"Four more times at different rates," the doctor explained. "And that will be it for the day. How do you feel?"

Cougar glared until he didn't have eyes any more, and the doctor raised his had again.

\---

Jensen watched the table whenever there was anything to see there, but most of the time, there wasn't. After the first three cycles, Cougar was allowed a break and handed a robe, which he threw on before coming to sit next to Jensen again.

The doctors and guards filed out of the room, though one of them kept watch through the window, as if it mattered. As if the camera set up in the hallway wasn't still recording.

"How're you doing?" Jensen asked, and Cougar shrugged.

Not for the first time in his life, Jensen wished he was telepathic. Wasn't like Cougar could say much here, anyway.

\---

Maybe Cougar had been hanging around Jensen too long, but he was beginning to wish he could read minds. He'd noticed the camera in the hallway, and the guard, too, and they were only alone for about five minutes before two trays of food and water were being brought in for them.

It was half an hour later when the doctors came back, and the tests started all over again.

\---

The lights never went out, not completely, but they were lowered at what was probably the end of the day. The humming of the containment field _never_ faded.

An hour or so after dinner - chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans that had mostly been cooked out of their shape, eaten with flimsy plastic cutlery- three guards came in to exchange their detritus for the air mattress again.

"This is great guys, really, but would it kill you to give us chairs?" Jensen asked as the mattress fell to the floor at his feet. "A beanbag or something?"

"Lack of sleep could skew the results. That's the only reason you're getting this much," the one guarding the door said, but at least nobody kicked Jensen in the head over it, though Cougar was considering it.

"He's not very affable, is he?" Jensen turned to him when the doors closed, ignoring the glares coming through the glass as the guards moved on.

Cougar was too tired for conversation, so he just dragged the mattress over to the corner and fell down onto it. A moment later, Jensen followed, lying on his stomach and facing away from the window, he turned slightly to regard Cougar.

"How're you doing?"

"Cansado. Bien."

"Good. That's… yeah." Jensen hung his head. "So how'd they find you?"

"Followed Aisha when I saw her at the airport. Don't know how she knew I was there."

"Think she could've been playing the odds, or did she know you were coming?"

Cougar shrugged. "I was at O'Hare, watching the news when your signal didn't come. They were talking about their offices in Saint Paul, so I came."

"Still, it's a bit of a coincidence."

"Not if she was looking for me." _Not if she didn't have prior knowledge_ , Cougar didn't say. _Not unless she heard something you let slip to Stegler._

"You think she got tipped off?" Jensen was scowling at the wall. "I mean, we _knew_ she was looking for you, and _now_ we know Stegler's crooked as fuck, but we don't know who _else_ they've got working with them."

There wasn't much Cougar could say to that, so he changed the subject. "How'd they find you?"

"I was an idiot. I knew about Stegler, but I didn't know that he knew I knew. Got me coming out of London, brought me here, about three days ago now, I think. Don't know, it's all jetlag and time differences and no windows in this place, but that's what it feels like. Thought it was all about the dirty laundry I'd aired all over the world up until you got here. Didn't think they knew enough to use me as bait, but Stegler's known you're still alive and kicking for a while now… so what do you think they're actually _doing_?"

"No sé."

"Supersoldiers. I'll bet it's supersoldiers. They're going to clone you." It made as much sense as anything did, so Cougar nodded. "Either that or they're going to force you to make babies with some lady supersoldier. Like Aisha. _That's_ her game. Fuck, she's gone baby crazy, I've seen it happen. Ordinarily sane women becoming these hell beasts on the rampage for sperm donors. _This_ is the natural outcome of a woman being neither ordinary nor sane."

Privately, Cougar figured that she probably would've had an easier time just getting him drunk, rather than stalking him, killing his family, and kidnapping, but Jensen seemed to be convincing himself.

It would've been almost funny, if it hadn't actually been a possibility.

Cougar looked at him, rolling his eyes, and Jensen nodded.

"Yeah. I know. Less worrying about the insane woman, more figuring out how we're going to get out of here. You have any ideas?" At Cougar's snort, he smirked. "Me neither. Glad we've got that sorted out."

\---

The experiments began again the next morning, with another doctor leading the tests this time. His bedside manner wasn't any better than Harris's had been, but it wouldn't have mattered if he'd come along and shot Cougar full of every drug imaginable before they started. It didn't change a thing.

One minute, Cougar was squinting against the harsh light from the ceiling, trying to prepare for whatever was coming next, and then the pain crashed through him.

\---

 _He's got about two minutes before the plane meets the first landing strip on American soil that Carlos has seen in sixteen months._

 _It's been a long, brutal, deployment, Kandahar and Kabul and back to Lahore, but it's finally over. He's not sure, exactly, when _discharge hearing_ came to mean _vacation_ , but the difference only seems to matter to everyone else._

Like Reynolds, sitting next to him and sweating like a pig. Reynolds, who's getting sent up right along with him, and who's been freaking the fuck out ever since the word came down.

As if some hearing is going to be worse than the fifteen shitstorms they've been through in the past two months.

"You've got to get a haircut, man," Reynolds mutters, as they make their way down the aisle to deplane. "They're going to nail you on that alone. Do you even _know_ where you left your uniform?"

Carlos shrugs, mutters something about Reynolds's mom's bedpost, and reaches down under the seat to grab the hat won off a drunk airman in Jalalabad. He's ready to just _go_ , already, but between him and the plane's are too many sluggishly moving people filing out of their seats, each wrestling with a stunning amount of carryon luggage.

He grins at the thought of leaning over the seat to where their escorts are sitting asking to swing by a barbershop on the way to the hearing, and Reynolds totally misunderstands it. Grabs his arm and tries to shake it, whispering angrily.

"They're going to nail both our asses to the wall, here, man, it's a fucking conspiracy!"

Reynolds was a great guy, but right now, he's being a fucking idiot, talking like that, and really, it's been a long goddamned flight.

"Conspiracies involve people knowing things. You meet anyone over the past four months that knew their ass from a hole in the ground? We had bad intel. We moved on it. It happens."

Finally, they're off the plane and heading into the terminal, where the escorts separate them. Reynolds is led off towards a group of three servicemen over by the coffee shop, and he's surprised when his own escort stops in front of two men in civilian gear.

One of them, the one not wearing the suit, is looking far too amused to see him, and Carlos decides immediately that the guy's a complete asshole, and his impression doesn't improve when he speaks.

"You didn't need to go stealing John Cougar Mellencamp's wardrobe, the brass is plenty pissed off with you as it is."

Carlos rolls his eyes and the suit extends his hand. "LC Franklin Clay. This is Corporal Jake Jensen. Nice to meet you. We've got to talk."

\---

Cougar was laid out on the table like an insubstantial trick of the light. Like a ghost being ripped apart slowly by masked doctors.

It wasn't vivisection if there wasn't a body there, if the particles weren't already split further apart than the width of a scalpel, but it was no easier to watch them dissecting empty air in the space where Cougar should've been, sending electrical impulses through empty space.

They brought Cougar's ghost back into existence, bit by bit, and they did it all again and again.

By the time Cougar was anything more than the vague impression of a man, his ghost was jerking under the knife, trying to escape, rise up off the table when the shocks came. It was obvious that he felt pain like this, but it wasn't until he was nearly all there, until there was just the vaguest hint of blurred edges, that he had enough of a voice to cry out.

In his head, Jensen knew it would be impractical for them to cause too much harm- not that these Goliath wonks seemed to be too concerned with proper conditions for human testing- but every time they brought Cougar back, whole again, Jensen was surprised.

He's a little more surprised at how fucking _boneless_ Cougar was when they were done. He had to be helped from the table, back into the sweats they've swapped out for his clothes, and the doctors half-carried him across the room to Jensen.

The guns were finally lowered, then, and Jensen hates that he's so damned transparent. That they knew he'd sooner help Cougar than attack them.

Part of him wondered if they're actually right, or if they're all just playing the odds. He'd been sitting here, unmoving, for hours, now, and it wasn't as if he was able to do much more than stop Cougar from collapsing in a heap and concussing himself on the motherfucking floor.

"...swear to god, I'm gonna...fuck...okay, easy now... hey. Shit, Cougs..." It wasn't until Cougar rolled onto his side and deliberately smacked his arm that Jensen realized he'd even been talking.

\---

Cougar didn't know how long they were there, how many tests he'd survived, or how many were still coming.

Sometimes- most of the time- they hurt. They were draining and exhausting and left him feeling like he'd just been washed to shore after a storm at sea.

Sometimes, they'd seem to go on forever, agony upon agony, and he'd get the impression that he'd passed out partway through one, only to wake when another was being completed.

Sometimes, they were quick and merely uncomfortable, and sometimes, the doctors wouldn't return for hours, maybe a day, afterwards.

Those were the hardest to deal with. They left him with too much time to wait, too tired to do anything more than listen as Jensen, lying on the mattress next to him, spun out plan after plan after plan. All the things they'd do once they were out of there. How they'd get there in the first place.

Cougar didn't have the heart to remind him that it wasn't likely they'd survive.

Still, though, most of the time when they were lying there, especially when the lights were off and they were too tired of worrying about what any surveillance might find, Jensen would curl himself around him.

Once, probably when Jensen thought he'd passed out again in the cold room, he thought he heard Jensen muttering into his hair as he shifted closer. It was his breath moving against his hair, more than anything, that he felt. "Can't protect you from anything but the cold, man. Sorry."

His voice sounded fucking _broken_. Cougar didn't want to turn to look at him, didn't want Jensen to know that he _knew_. He waited a few minutes until it could've been construed as shifting in his sleep, caught Jensen's hand where it rested on his chest, and stared at the wall, wondering what it would feel like if he had to watch Jensen being strapped down to a table and tortured. Day after day after day.

\---

The doctors and guards walked around like Jensen wasn't even there, anymore, and he kept his eyes down to ensure it. It worked. After the first few days, he'd begun compiling all the things he learned through stolen snatches of conversation.

Jensen had learned a lot more than they would've expected him to know, like where the controls for the containment field were set up.

 _Just inside the doorway to the laboratory._

Or that he knew how to turn it off.

 _Hold the button for three seconds, and then flip the switch._

Or that, upstairs, Goliath was starting to close up shop.

 _That redheaded scientist doesn't know how she's going to get everything organized for her move to the Baltimore office, but Dr. Kenyatta assures her that the facilities there are much nicer than here_.

Or that, day after tomorrow, the radiation experiments would begin. But it wasn't until he heard three voices in the hallway outside, in the middle of the night, that he remembered how to _panic_.

\---

"So we're all ready, then?" It was Stegler talking, Jensen didn't need to open his eyes to confirm.

"Yes. Once this series of tests has been completed, after the final experiment, we've got the go-ahead to begin production." Dr. Harris was speaking, his voice a little tense, and it was easy enough to understand why when the next person spoke.

"You said they'd be in the arsenal in ten months," Aisha sounded irritated. "So far, all I see is that you haven't even moved past phase one."

"As you can see, the subject has been cooperating fully, and there are only three more tests in the series before we can move onwards. As long as these final tests operate in accordance with the models, which they _will_ , we've got nine months before we're ready for shipping. It will, however, probably be a year before deployment, but that, you see, is out of our hands."

Stegler's voice cut in, a little more loudly, all tense enthusiasm. "Wonderful. Glad I retained the stock when the market went under, yeah?"

"Agreed," Harris laughed. "Now if you'd like to follow me back upstairs, we should be all set for the conference call with Korea. Are you planning on staying to observe the fireworks?"

\---

Cougar had woken up when Jensen's grip on his side tightened suddenly, and once the footsteps drifted off down the hallway, he rolled over to look at him.

Jensen allowed it when his hand touched Jensen's face, a gesture that had been meant as a warning to keep silent when it began, and turned into something else when he could feel the stubble under his fingers.

"It's bad," Jensen sounded hopeless. He was trying to hide it, but his hand curled into Cougar's shirt as he tried to grin. "You down for a jack move?"

Cougar wasn't ready for much more than never moving, ever again, but _one_ of them had to be, and Jensen wasn't holding it together any better than he himself was. Cougar nodded, and Jensen whispered a hopefully-not-suicidal plan against the palm of his hand.

\---

It was almost funny, lying there in the dark with Cougar curled against him, hand resting against his neck, how much better the plan sounded with Cougar listening. How much more likely survival seemed when he nodded as it came together.

How he suddenly knew it was the greatest idea ever conceived of by man in the moment Cougar, after a moment's consideration, finally grinned.

How he forgot it even _existed_ when Cougar's fingers stroked along his jaw, regarding him in the low light, and how all that remained was the kiss.

\---


	11. Chapter 11

Cougar opened his eyes to find Jensen watching him warily, and he could see the frown deepening as Jensen watched what Cougar was feeling- the onset of another massive headache – make itself known. But Jensen was determined, even before Cougar could find the words to tell him why he was wincing.

"So. Cue awkward morning after conversation. I mean, I know it didn't go, like, all the way, but they went pretty far, and I don't know if it's actually morning, down here, but the principle still applies. We can sort the rest out later, but I need to know one thing. You gonna break my nose?"

"No."

"And you're not just sparing me because you've decided that we're both probably going to die in the next twenty four hours?"

"No. He ran his knuckles along Jensen's arm experimentally. Casting his eyes to the window allowed him to keep watch while avoiding his gaze. "Estado enamorado de ti durante semanas, tal vez más. Nada ha cambiado, otros que cómo me ves."

It took Jensen a few moments to translate, but he relaxed, and when Cougar looked at him again, he was blushing, deep red. "You know you slip back into Spanish when you're nervous? So, ah. Bien. Yo también." He caught Cougar's hand on the down-stroke and squeezed it, once. "Just so you know, and you're not-" he broke off, smirking. "Not the only one showing a card, here."

It was just as well Cougar had no idea how to react, no idea what to do next, because outside, in the hallway, footsteps were approaching. Jensen could hear them too.

\---

Jensen was having a hard time getting his head around it. This entire thing with Cougar. He'd meant what he said, and judging by the evidence- the entire lack of laughter and stunned, fuck, _happy_ look on Cougar's face, he'd probably managed to not mangle the words beyond all recognition.

Still, though, that had been ten minutes ago, and he really needed to change gears, here. Their mattress had been taken away, and they were eating their breakfasts as usual- oatmeal with raisins today, fucking disgusting, but at least they'd been allowed coffee.

He stole another glance in Cougar's direction, caught his eyes darting away and the smirk that followed, watched it turn into a scowl as Cougar shook his head. _Stop it, man. Focus. Save this googley-eye shit for later_.

"You first," Jensen muttered, and turned, deliberately, to watch the hallway, wondering which one of them was going to get the other one killed first.

Pretty soon, they were going to find out. He could see the gurney being prepped in the lab across the hall.

\---

Obviously needing it more than he wanted to admit- and that wasn't anything that Jensen wanted to contemplate too deeply- Cougar had one hand on the wall, steadying himself as he stood. It was harder than Jensen had expected not to glance up at him, to check, but they couldn't afford sending out any stray signals. Instead, he shifted his weight, crossing his legs, every inch of him the image of someone settling in for a long boring morning of being held at gunpoint and watching his best friend- _ooh, friends with benefits, cool_ \- being tortured.

It also meant that before Jensen could stand up to run, he'd have to move more just to get his legs underneath him, which would be a problem if he had any intention of running. But that wasn't the plan.

This entire thing was going to be an exercise in using things against themselves. This room, these guards, their guns.

He waited for his moment, didn't flinch when the guards shoved their guns in his face for the billionth time that week, and watched Cougar approach the gurney out of the corner of his eye.

And then Cougar stopped. That was the signal.

Lurching forward, he grabbed the barrel of the rifle and pulled it down and to the side, sharply. Even if the guard had released his grip, the shoulder strap would've brought him down. deflecting the guard's aim and pulling him tumbling, more or less, into Jensen's lap.

Another twist and he was slipping the rifle out of his grasp, and was pulling the guard's sidearm- a Walther P99, by the feel of it- out of its holster.

Three slick movements later and he had the Walther up to the guard's chin, and rifle's strap hooked carefully around his own elbow. He shifted so the butt of the gun was propped against the wall, but even so, if he had to shoot it, he'd probably break his own arm and deafen everyone in the room.

But it beat getting disarmed.

And better yet, for those few instants, everyone's eyes were off Cougar.

\---

It was elegant in its simplicity, using Goliath's own system against them. Their entire security protocol hinged on one thing: preventing Cougar from becoming corporeal.

They'd completely overlooked the damage Cougar was capable of inflicting with his bare, solid hands, or the fact that Jensen had noticed that while the specialized restraints were heavy, solid things, there was a weak point, two or three centimeters of exposed wires, wrapping around the hinges.

They were obvious, now that Cougar was seeing them, but he hadn't been looking before.

He probably could've busted out any time, if he'd only been paying attention.

But he could get angry about that later. Right now what was important was the fact that they'd apparently decided that three guards and one in the hall were enough to keep them contained, and they hadn't been wrong, until Jensen had three of them frozen in the cell.

He grabbed hold of one of the restraints, and, curling his body around it as if he were locked in place, he kept his posture rigid, his head cocked to the side as if watching the hostage situation unfold, but all his attention was on the guard rushing through the door behind him.

Throwing himself backwards as the guard stepped past, he knocked his ankle, _hard_ , on the edge of the door. Catching the handle, he swung the door shut behind him Recovering in the middle of the hallway, he sidestepped and slid into the laboratory across the way.

The scientist dropped the laptop when he crashed into her, and the impact was enough to steal his breath, too, but that wasn't it, not at all.

The containment field didn't stretch out this far.

When the scientist glanced up, he was nowhere to be seen, but she only looked once before running out of the lab and down towards the exit.

\---

Jensen was relieved that the guards probably weren't paid enough to be stupidly loyal to Goliath. And if it wasn't concern for their teammates that had them sliding their guns across the floor and under the gurney, they at least appreciated the finer points of self-preservation.

But they weren't exactly ecstatic about their position, either, and they were watching Jensen carefully. Waiting for their chance the same way Jensen had watched for his. And they'd probably realized, hell, they'd probably known for weeks now, that the doors would only open from the outside.

Alarms were suddenly going off, now, and there was a flashing light in the hallway. In a moment, Jensen was going to be outnumbered on all sides.

And the fact he had no idea what the hell was happening - that he couldn't even glance towards the window lest one of the guards take the opportunity to strike- was _not_ helping him keep his calm, peaceful view of the universe.

\---

The headache lessened a bit as he breached the field, but stretching himself out so thin took effort. Even out in the hallway, he could feel the pull of the containment field as it tried to pull his molecules back together, like water down a drain.

He only had a second to test around the edges, look for a clean path out past the doors in both directions. There was a stairwell down the hall, just around the corner from the elevator, and two labs over, someone was speaking hurriedly into a phone as they pressed a button on the wall.

The alarm blared through him, he could feel the vibrations of the keening wail.

Three scientists moved through him towards the stairwells, laptops and purses and whatever they could grab clutched to their chests.

They were evacuating.

\---

Cougar scanned what he could of the lab, but there were no obvious means of shutting down the containment field, and when he pulled himself together enough to start flipping switches and pressing buttons at random, he found that his jaw was clenched so tight in frustration that his teeth felt like they might break.

And the pounding in his head was only getting worse.

Another panel, by the lab's door, had line of sight on the cell, just barely, and he could see the guards kneeling, now, shifting to sit on their hands, but the one seated closest to the gurney was glancing sideways at the floor. They were going to make a move, soon, and the payback they'd take out on Jensen would be _serious_.

And already, reinforcements were gathering three floors above.

\---

Three stories above, Stegler and Dr. Harris were fronting the gathered security team, and Aisha was striding out of one of the offices.

"Why are you even still _here_?" Aisha glared at. Harris, her eyes spitting fire.

"I have all the data, everything, all the results in this drive here. What I don't have is many more times to observe my subjects. And nothing personal, Aisha, but I don't trust your judgment in this matter."

  
"I'm so _glad_ to see you implemented my suggestions for the security upgrades," she grumbled sarcastically. "You _know_ Alvarez is the last of the test subjects. After him, the well's gone dry. You think Mama Goliath's going to be thrilled?"

"They've got enough for predictive modeling. Everything else is icing. We kill on sight," Stegler waved his hand to indicate another throng of scientists rushing past. "And the call came down from on high- much higher than _you_ , Aisha, to begin containment and cleanup operations. Don't worry about the politics. You'll still get paid."

"The bomb's prepped?" Dr. Harris checked his watch and glanced up at Stegler.

"Wired and ready, all we need's the signal." Stegler raised his hand, brandishing the detonator. "It's on a three minute lead once I press go. We still worrying about Alvarez?"

"He could be in _orbit_ by now," Harris rolled his eyes as he surveyed the area warily. "And as much as I'd love to gather more data-"

"He's here," Aisha snorted, shaking her head. "There's literally _nowhere_ in the world for him to go, any more, and Jensen's still locked down, right?"

"Yes, but he's got four, maybe five guards-"

"The only thing that matters is that Alvarez _is_ still here. Be ready for him." Aisha checked her sidearm. "Looks like we're on wrangling patrol. Soon as we're done, we get the hell out. Primary exit is the north stairwell, secondary is the south."

"And then we get our asses _clear_ of the building," Stegler added as he turned towards the stairwell. "Not that I'm lacking faith, but we don't have any idea how far the blast radius is going to be."

"We _do_ , actually," Harris cut in as he followed them through the doorway. "There won't _be_ one, just a patch of _nothing_ with a parking lot attached.. Which, if you'll remember, was the entire fucking point of this entire goddamned enterprise," Harris muttered as they reached the stairwell. "But hey, it ought to cheer up the shareholders, at least."

"What the hell kind of name is _snuke_ , anyway?" Stegler joked as they headed into the stairwell. "Sounds like something out of a Dr. Seuss book."

\---

Jensen could hear the footsteps coming, saw Stegler appearing in the doorway first, his gun aimed warily towards the ground.

Which was why it was so surprising to be going deaf at the sound of gunfire, and he'd been hit, he knew it-

Only he hadn't. The two guards on the end slumped forward as Aisha stepped around Stegler and strode forward, one gun pointed at him, the other covering at the guards.

And once the guards were dead, her eyes flashed at Jensen over the barrels of two guns, carefully aimed.

"Yeah, okay!" he might've been yelling as he set his guns down. "There's no reason to be unreasonable!"

Aisha was shaking her head as Stegler and the doctor filed in behind her, and the ringing in his ears subsided just enough to hear her yelling Cougar's name.

"…we've got your _boy_ , Alvarez…he's dying… unless-"

He missed most of it. But he didn't miss Cougar materializing in the hallway outside, dropping into a crouch and creeping forward.

\---

Cougar had missed his shot to get the containment field deactivated, and there was a good chance it was about to get him killed, but a kick to the back of the knee and another one to the head had Stegler going down.

Harris was the closer, easier target, but Aisha was already swinging one arm back to aim at him, her aim disturbingly unerring.

Her other gun was too busy shooting Jensen to notice.

If it hadn't been for Harris' overextension as he threw the first punch, the bullet would've hit Cougar straight on. As it was, though, the shot caught the doctor in the shoulder, throwing him off balance just enough to crash into Cougar.

By the time Cougar twisted free of him enough to glance up again, Aisha was kicking him in the chest, and he bounced against the wall, feeling his head bounce off the concrete. The exertion had been enough to send the blood pounding through his already overtaxed vessels, and his head hurt so badly he couldn't _see_ , but he shoved himself forward again, as fast as he could.

The first hit connected, catching her in the gut, but it had left him open, and the butt of her sidearm crashed against his throat as she suddenly lost her balance. It afforded him the opportunity to glance over at Jensen, see the smirk on his face as he withdrew the foot that had tripped her.

Jensen was wincing, though, as he tried to stand.

"Dammit, my foot's asleep!" he complained, before all color shot from his face "And my other one's been _shot_ "

"Estas bien?" Cougar kicked the doctor in the back, _hard_ as he crossed the floor.

"Oh, I'm peach- _shit_!"

Expecting a gun in his face, Cougar spun just in time to see Aisha swinging the door shut behind her, before staggering across the hallway.

\---

Jensen eased back against the wall, training the gun he'd recovered on Stegler, who was starting to move again. If it came down to it, it would be a criminally easy shot at this close a range. If Cougar would just stop _jostling_ him, for fuck's sake.

Cougar managed to get the belt he'd taken off Harris around Jensen's leg, cinching it tight before slumping against him with a frown.

"You okay?" Jensen's own voice sounded far away, distant.

Cougar frowned, reaching a hand up to his head and glancing again at Jensen's leg, and said something that Jensen couldn't hear through all the ringing.  "… should hold."

Stegler was grinning before he opened his eyes, and it turned into a huffing laugh. "… for all the good…" He was holding up the detonator, though, as he sat up, and it was enough to get his point across. He'd probably hit the switch when he'd gone down, if not deliberately.

Jensen could feel Cougar tensing next to him, ready to spring into action again.

"How much time we got?" Jensen called out, and the answering shrug was honestly a little depressing. The detonator was a black box with a switch. A beta version, with no bells, whistles, readouts or countdown screen. There was no way to know.

But if Jensen only had ten seconds left before being blasted out of existence, he didn't want to spend it dealing with Stegler, so he shot him in the face.

\---

In retrospect, deafening Cougar, too, hadn't probably been the best way to handle the situation.

\---

Cougar couldn't hear anything, and it hurt to open his eyes, but at least then he could see Jensen's face, as discouraging as it was, watching him try to shout at him.

He shook his head, violently. _I can't hear_

Jensen's head fell back against the wall again, and his eyes were closed, but he reached out an arm. Cougar let himself be pulled close, over, until he was keeling on either side of Jensen's outstretched legs. Avoiding the injury was as close to saving him as he was going to get. Pressing his forehead to Jensen's, he gripped his shoulders, tight.

He'd died in a bomb once, and Jensen hadn't been there.

This was so much worse, and Cougar wanted to apologize, to say _something_ , so he thought _te amo_ as hard as his pounding head would allow, and kissed him back until the shockwave hit.

\---


	12. Epilogue

Jensen opens his eyes- still has eyes _to_ open, but he's not thinking about that yet, because all he can see is Cougar, lying curled on the concrete next to him. He's disoriented, pushing himself up and cocking his head sideways- _Vámonos_ \- before reaching down for Jensen's hand.

They're in a parking garage, and the minivan on the level beneath them is familiar, and though he can't remember seeing it before, he's the one opening the rear passenger side door and reaching forward to get the front door, letting Cougar in to rummage through the glove box.

Jensen already knows he's going to find the keys, just like he knows that the sedan parked two spots down has a busted exhaust system.

He's seen all of this, he knows it, but it doesn't all fit in his brain, for some reason, and he wasn't supposed to be seeing anything ever again, anyhow.

And now Cougar's pushing him into the driver's seat and telling him to go before the authorities lock it all down.

When he turns out towards the highway, Jensen gets his first and last look at the churned dirt at the edge of a parking lot, bright under the already massing news van spotlights.

\---

It's three stolen wallets and ten minutes hotwiring a new car at two thirty in the morning while Cougar's inside, procuring shoes and clothes that don't scream "escaped test subject," and then it's another two hours before they even see the lights of Chicago on the horizon ahead.

They still haven't talked about any of this, but they've got cash, now, they can get a hotel room and just _sleep_ until the panic wears off.

\---

The news agencies have been running with a story about a gas main going up and dragging the lab down into a previously unknown cave system, but it's three weeks before Jensen's got a real working theory. The DOD chatter seems to be that an explosive nuclear device with modified tritium had detonated, encountering an electrical field strong enough to replicate it's own gravity.

And the only reason they got out of there, Jensen guesses, is that the shockwave destabilized the containment field a split second before it had reached their cell, and Cougar had dragged him out on instinct alone.

He's not the type to believe in miracles, but Cougar's lounging in the chair across from him, picking at his food while watching the bogus story on the news, grinning, and hell, it's close enough for Jensen.

\---

Cougar spends most of his time stretched out over whatever southern city they've landed in this week, watching the area around their hotel for intruders. Jensen hasn't been able to find any online, either, and it's a little too soon to say for sure, but it's starting to feel a little anticlimactic.

Still, though, over the course of weeks, Jensen eventually suffers Cougar's increasing restlessness enough to follow him out into the streets again, where there are normal people doing normal things, and they catch a beer in some shitty bar that's showing the Cowboys trouncing the Vikings. Jensen's halfway through his third or fourth, rambling about ninjas fighting when he catches Cougar laughing and realizes- _holy shit_ \- they're on a date.

Of sorts.

 _Maybe_.

Jensen's not sure.

Whatever it is, though, it's enough to ease away the space between them. First it's Cougar's leg pressed experimentally against his own at the bar, then it's his hand low on Cougar's back as they head back to the hotel, and then it's both of them, standing too close, waiting for the other one to do _something_ , first.

He's never been all that patient, but all he needs to do is shift his weight before Cougar's moving, too, pressing their mouths together before either of them- well, _Jensen_ \- can say anything to fuck this up.

Cougar shrugs his hands away violently when Jensen digs into his shoulders, but he doesn't seem to mind those same fingers carding through to tug at his hair. He actually seems to take it as a suggestion, mirroring the action to wrestle Jensen's face down closer, and Jensen's going to get a kink in his neck if they stay too long like this, but already, Cougars easing his grip, biting the side of his chin before cocking his head to look at him.

They kiss some more, slower now, just because they don't know what to do next. It's all starts and stops with them, maybe, but it's not something they need to talk about.

\---

Jensen's just tall enough to make this awkward, so Cougar takes a breath before stepping him back towards the bed, momentarily, at least, more fixated on correcting the height difference than anything else.

When he catches on- and it takes a moment, but it happens- Jensen starts pulling him forward by his belt. Cougar's not sure who hits the mattress first, honestly. The friction of Jensen's thigh is distracting, pushed between his own like this, and Jensen's hands are moving into his back pockets.

Cougar manages to smooth a hand down his side and tugs at his waistband; curling his fingers down behind the fabric elicits a startled jerk, and Jensen's laugh against his mouth as he drags him closer, grinding back against him.

His hair gets caught in the collar of his shirt when Jensen tugs it over his head, so he's not all that careful when it's his turn to strip Jensen's off, and he's too busy trying to maneuver around Jensen's traveling hands to be efficient, anyway. Eventually, though, there's skin against his own and a fumbling at his belt.

Jensen's movements are slow, hesitant now, but the flush spreading over his skin could be from the exertion as much as anything. Cougar's a little relieved that he's got no idea what he looks like right now, but it's probably not far off.

"You good?" Jensen's going still, though, and it's confirmation enough.

\---

Cougar blinks, dazed, before answering, and his smile's a little wild as his eyes lose their certainty, and he's winding up to ask Jensen the same thing, or worse, spout some line about how they _don't have to do this_ , which is such total bullshit. So Jensen moves, fast, kisses him hard, just in case Cougar thought he was about to get the last word in or something.

The mechanics aren't all that different than what he's used to, belt, button, zipper, but the shape of him through the fabric is a little novel, and if the awkward scrabbling of fingers at his own fly is any indication, he's not the only one noticing.

Fighting off jeans and boots- socks, too- there's finally nothing left but a sudden quick pain at the back of his skull when he bangs his head against the wall, but it's forgotten quickly enough when Cougar's chest slides smoothly against his own and his thumb finds the hollow underneath his hipbone.

\---

His fingers slide down, low, and Cougar catches at Jensen's mouth when they curl around his length. The skin shifts under his fingers in a way that he should've expected, and he strokes up again. The move is more bravado than actual confidence, but he figures he's getting by. Jensen's mouth is going slack and his hands won't stop trying to insinuate themselves in the small spaces between them, manic, even for Jensen.

If they're going to freak about this, it's going to come later, but Cougar's got proof of concept, dragging his palm over Jensen's crown before wrapping around him again, a little tighter this time.

Jensen's staring at him, eyes so far blown that he probably can't even see, breathing short.

\---

His head still hurts from where he hit it against the headboard, and he tries to focus on the sensation, now, tries to stave off the inevitable for reasons that he's miles away from knowing.

Cougar's found his stride. He's _watching_ him coming apart, and he's _got_ to know that if he'd just ease back an inch, make space, Jensen could do for him, too, a lot more efficiently than he's managing _now_ \- but his wrist just doesn't twist that far and-

Cougar's mouth is open, and the muscles in his chest twitch when Jensen manages to gain the tiniest leverage, and his breath _stutters_ for just an instant, the most gorgeous thing, and-

 _Fuck_.

Cougar's kissing him through it, his smug grin not quite jiving with the near-blown pupils and heated skin when he pulls back enough to let Jensen breathe. He's _close_ , and more importantly, is _finally_ shifting so Jensen can drag him down with him.

\---

"Just so you know, we already had the morning after conversation, and you already know that I love you and you love me and Barney can fuck off to whatever kinky fucktard furry convention he wants," Jensen mumbles into the side of Cougar's neck, after. "So when we wake up, I'm just going to try sucking you off instead. And get breakfast."

Cougar doesn't know for certain that _either_ of them are awake at that point, and he'll have to ask who the hell _Barney_ is in the morning,

He doesn't think he's going to have to ask much of anything else, though.

\---

It takes Jensen three weeks to lay the groundwork for the hack on the stock exchange, and it's another month before it takes any effect. When it does, though, it takes less than the span of one trading day for the FTC to come in and halt trading on Goliath's plummeting stock.

They're bankrupt, but the FTC investigation is going to have to wait until after the ongoing UN tribunal, which is slated to still be going strong eleventy billion years from now.

Still, though, Jensen wonders if they can get tickets. He'd kind of like to watch the show.

\---

They're sitting on the patio, halfway through their beers when the waiter comes out to take their order, and Cougar's rolling his eyes at Jensen's indecisiveness.

After months spent trying to get this close, of circling carefully and watching to make sure nobody else is, it's a relief that to finally lay eyes on them, but Aisha tells herself it doesn't matter.

Because if it _does_ , then visual confirmation isn't nearly enough, and this wouldn't be about covering her tracks, anymore. It would be about _them_ , and if they didn't shoot her on sight, they'd probably want her to _apologize_ , and she's just not feeling it. She's not up to explaining _shit_ to them, either.

Like how Stegler's motives had never been her own, or that she'd been in Tokyo when Stratenfield took out his family. She hadn't killed them, but it hadn't mean she'd _felt_ anything about them, either, or that she wouldn't have gone that far had she thought it useful.

They hadn't needed half a billion dollars in particle research to get Cougar, and they hadn't needed to kill his family. All they'd needed was Jensen, and they'd had him. And far as she's concerned, shutting off the containment field before escaping had cleared any debt she might've accrued. But this isn't about making amends.

This is about keeping her own ass clear of Goliath's attention, same as it's always been, and this, _here_ , is closure enough for her.

Aisha pulls her molecules back in until she's solid again, real, until she can feel the roof of the office tower beneath her feet, and she glances over the ledge in their direction again, but from this height, it's too far down to see.

And if anyone's looking up, scanning for her presence, they won't see her, either.

\---

 _The End_.


End file.
